Exposed
by JMK758
Summary: Tony has always wanted NCIS to be famous, and as the pundits say, there's no such thing as bad publicity. They're wrong.
1. Trending

This is my twenty-fifth NCIS Mystery and the fifth of my Third Season, excluding numerous stand-alone and one-shot stories. The list got so extensive I moved it, with summaries, to my profile.  
The usual legal disclaimers apply. I don't own anyone except Rev. Siobhan McGee, SSA Kevin Lamb, SAs Janet Levy, Lisa DuBois and other original Agents.  
Please Review.  
Rating: T or NCis-17.

Exposed  
by JMK758  
Chapter One  
Trending

Leroy Jethro Gibbs is surprised to step off the elevator into the 3rd floor Operations Division and see Abby Sciuto pacing the entrance to his team's bullpen. He reaches the entry as the white-coated scientist completes a circuit and turns back for another pass. "Abby?"

"Gibbs! Thank _goodness_!" She runs to him, grabs his arms tightly. "Have you heard anything? What happened? Where _are _they? Why aren't they here? They _have_ to be here! Today! _Now_!"

"Calm down, Abby, where are who?" He shifts the large hot coffee cup from right to left hand, further away from her. In her state, he doesn't want her near a 'Caf-Pow!' either, she seems to have inhaled several already, a significant feat for 0645.

"They! Them! The main gate called me sixteen and a half minutes ago. They checked in and never came. Gibbs, you've gotta _find _them, they could be–" When the elevator's chime announces the car's return, she shifts him sharply to the side so she can look past him. "McGEES!" she cries and Gibbs yanks the coffee, and himself, aside as she charges past, her white lab coat flying like a cape.

He turns in time to see Tim McGee and his bride virtually leapt upon, neither managing to get clear before being captured in an ecstatic hug. Gibbs can see only their faces, Abby's lab coat covers the pair like a shroud and each looks taken aback by the over-enthused welcome.

"Oh, I've missed you two so _much_. You have no idea what it's been like here. Air-tight bedroom, car driven off a cliff, stolen fake Van Gogh, PO2 with 30 boa constrictors that got away and terrorized Norfolk Elementary how was Ireland how was the honeymoon tell me everything!"

Tim, on her left, manages to wheeze "Abby, air becoming an issue."

"Oh! Sorry," she releases them as abruptly as she'd captured them and each tries to withdraw a step out of range, "It's just that I missed you."

"Got that," he assures her, regaining his breath. He's wearing a traditional white Irish cable-knit sweater over brown trousers, Siobhan is in her 'work attire' of long black skirt, light blue clerical blouse with two inch high band of stiff white encircling her throat. Gibbs can now see they're each laden with shopping bags that'd been hidden by Abby's lab coat.

"Thank you, Abby," Siobhan says, her brogue stronger than Gibbs remembers it. "That's about the most enthusiastic greeting we've had."

To Gibbs it sounds like she isn't looking forward to it being bettered. Movement behind him makes him glance back to find DiNozzo, David and Palmer gathered at the bullpen entrance, waiting to welcome their partner and his new wife back until it's safe to do so.

x

The travelers reach the bullpen and their waiting friends, whose greetings, while as heartfelt, are more subdued than Abby's. But Tim halts in mid-word when he sees what's been done to his desk.

The workstation is covered, nearly buried, with balloons, flowers, ribbons, banners, stars, streamers, signs, rainbows, cards, dolls, shamrocks and bunting of all imaginable colors. He's not certain but he trusts there _is _a desk somewhere in that Mardi Gras float.

"Do you like it?" Abby asks with enthusiastic pride. "Michelle and I arranged it."

"Three days after you _left_," Tony enjoys his partner's somewhat stunned expression.

"It's very ... nice," Siobhan says.

"You shouldn't have," Tim says, trying to sound appropriately grateful rather than letting his true feelings color his words.

None of the agents are quick to warn Siobhan of what awaits her in her 4th floor office. While Gibbs had restrained the ebullient scientist's efforts in the bullpen, she had turned her festive imagination loose with élan upon the upstairs office. Gibbs had told her to make sure the priest could open the door, but Michelle hopes he doesn't learn how near a thing it will be.

"So, how was the honeymoon?" Michelle asks to divert attention from the float and the upcoming discovery of the reviewing stand.

"Yeah, McGee," Tony urges, "tell us the details."

Tim doesn't need his wife's brief headshake. "Not a chance."

x

"You're glowing," Michelle tells Siobhan, who for a moment isn't sure the witch isn't referring to some mystical aura thing. "You have that new bride glow," she elaborates.

"Yes," Ziva says. "It suits you very well."

"You're glowing too, Probie," DiNozzo says and for a moment Tim is afraid the man is going to bring up that 'Feminine Glow' cream incident, but Tony does nothing more than give a smirk, as though reading his beleaguered friend's mind - or his fears.

"Well, two weeks in Ireland will do that. I hear you're a celebrity," Tim tells Abby, hoping to distract their friends from being too curious about either this or the honeymoon details, either way they being things the group will never learn.

Abby smiles broadly, pleased that fame - such as it may be - has preceded her. "Not quite yet, but soon I guess, at least maybe in the Forensics community." She gives up striving for humility, she can't manage it yet. "Last week I hosted a segment on the Science Channel on the 'History of Forensics, 1901 to 2000'."

"When does it air?" Siobhan asks.

"The end of the week."

"I look forward to it."

"I guess everyone's going to be coming to you for your autograph," Tim says, seeing she can't contain an anticipatory smile. "How's your houseguest?" he asks instead.

"Sammy's great. She sends her love, she has a concert this evening so she's at rehearsal or she'd be here to greet you."

"We'll see her soon," he assures her, knowing he has to take things in stages. Abby Sciuto and Samantha Sky at their most enthusiastic at the same time is something few man can survive. Instead he turns to Michelle. "And your husband's a _doctor _now."

"Yeah!" She still hasn't gotten beyond the thrill, supposing it'll take a long while to wear off and hoping it never will. "He passed his tests last week. They're having a formal graduation ceremony at GWU but yes, he's as effectively now _Doctor_ Palmer."

"And you're slightly proud," he teases. No one could have misinterpreted that tone.

"Kind of."

"So," Siobhan wants to know, "how is it being married to an MD?"

"Every night he plays doctor."

She grins. "Gives you an Internal?"

"You should see his probe. And he's got instruments that–"

"Hey, hey! Enough with the powder room talk!"

"Sorry, Tony." Siobhan says it, but he doubts she is, for she leans an inch closer to Michelle to say in a stage whisper "We'll talk more newlywed secrets later."

"Count on it," Michelle assures her in as false a whisper. "I've gotta tell you about this new thing Jimmy got for us to share; it'll _curl _your hair." She glances significantly, not at Siobhan's head, but...

"Hey come _on_ I said!"

"Never took you for a prude, Tony," Tim taunts.

"I'm not a prude - I just think there's an appropriate place for this talk."

Siobhan sobers, for now, but the look she exchanges with Michelle makes it clear they'll talk a lot more frankly - or explicitly - when there are no men around to interfere. "We'll drop down later to congratulate James properly," she assures Michelle, who hopes it's while she's still in a good mood - before she sees her office.

x

"We brought you all some presents," Siobhan announces, hefting her two shopping bags as Tim sets his own two at his feet. She draws from one bag a brown meter-plus-long, green paper wrapped rod. "This is for you, Jethro."

Gibbs hides mild surprise. Ever since meeting her, and particularly for the months she's been with NCIS, he's been 'Agent Gibbs' to her, and he supposes this defines a new level of relationship between them. When he tears off the paper the shillelagh, a deep brown walking stick, is gnarled in the traditional manner, the highly polished wood never being carved straight. The front of it, inches down from the knobbed head, is laser etched with the Gibbs Arms, three upright battle axes, middle one lowest.

"Thank you," he says, not quite knowing when he'll make use of it. He anticipates – and in this job has every expectation of it happening – being dead before reaching the age or condition when he needs a cane.

"It has a traditional use as a motivator that'll help save your hand," Siobhan tells him with an almost-smirk.

Gibbs looks to DiNozzo, his smile growing as he realizes the gift does indeed have a very practical use. "Thank you," he tells the priest.

"Yeah, thanks a lot," Tony says. "I'll take Last Rites now and get it over with."

"Not yet, Tony," Tim demurs. "Got a long way to go."

"Yeah, DiNozzo, if you're lucky," Gibbs assures him, rapping the rounded top into his left hand, his expression deadly.

"And for Michelle," Tim reaches deep into the bag, roots about for a moment and pulls out - a silver stapler.

Michelle laughs delightedly, flashing back more than a year ago to Tony DiNozzo's return from a conference in Germany, when he'd completely forgotten a gift for the newest team member. "You're never gonna let me forget that, are you?"

"Nope."

"But this," Siobhan says, pulling a ten inch high white box from one of her bags, "we think you'll appreciate more."

When Michelle opens it she pulls out a white marble statue of 'Venus on the Half-Shell' set upon a sea of tiny green shamrocks.

"Thank you." The petite woman espouses both Christian and Wiccan faiths and prays to the Goddess she never names to her partners, but she considers Venus to be her particular patroness.

x

"Abby, we thought of you when we saw this." Tim hands her a rolled cloth the color of parchment. When the woman unrolls it she finds it to be a wall hanging decorated with a myriad of arcane symbols and ancient calligraphic text.

"The Book of the Kells," Abby exclaims in delight, turning to show it to Michelle, the one other person who might appreciate it to the fullest. "Do you know what this is?"

"I know," she says, unable to hide the envious feeling.

"It was actually a toss-up," Tim admits, "as to which of you would appreciate it more," he reaches into his bag, "so we decided not even to try to choose." He unrolls a similar though not identical hanging.

"Thank you," Michelle exclaims in delight, hugging him.

"Watch it, kid," Siobhan admonishes with a wide grin, "don't get too familiar. He's mine; you've one of your own."

"Don't worry," Michelle says happily. "Tim just can't compete."

"Hey."

"Ziva," Siobhan says, mostly to save her new husband as she hands Ziva a foot square white box about an inch high, from which the woman withdraws a large white linen decorated primarily in green shamrocks, silver stars and Irish knots, the large scarf almost reminiscent of a tallis. Ziva draws it over her shoulders, appreciating the fine decorative work. She kisses Tim and Siobhan.

"Tony, we decided this was perfect for you," Tim announces, handing his partner a rectangular package that turns out to be a book.

"'Irish insults'?"

"Some of yours were getting a bit stale."

"Not anymore," Tony assures his favorite target.

x

"So," Tony says broadly to Siobhan, always a bad sign for those who know him, "did McGee get you anything special in Ireland?"

"As a matter of fact he did. Three beautifully tailored cassocks, in the Anglican style."

This isn't exactly what Tony had been anticipating. "He took you to Ireland and got you vestments?" He turns to Tim. "You and I are gonna have a talk."

"You said Anglican style," Michelle cuts in. "Is there a difference?"

"Oh, yes. Anglican style is cut differently, especially for women, with a wide black sash about the waist. When I wear it, as Shania Twain sings: '_man, I feel like a woman_."

"But wait," Tony says, trying to stay on track and definitely not to think of this with his partner's wife, "I thought you were in _south _Ireland."

"Oh, we were; three rustic Bed and Breakfasts in Wicklow, Sligo and Cork. No big cities for me, we O'Mallorys were farmers before we emigrated."

"But where would you find Anglican things there? I mean, forgive my ignorance–"

"Frequently," Gibbs quips.

"Heh heh. Anyway, I wouldn't think–"

Siobhan cuts in before anyone can take advantage of that unguarded opening. "Actually, he bought them here, through Almy, and had them shipped ahead to Cork, knowing I'd be more surprised."

"Heh, who'd've thought McNally would be such a devious world traveler?"

"Oh, that _reminds _me." She puts her hand to Tony's cheek and says kindly, "I know you and my husband have an interesting friendship, but it's taken me a very long time and the only Mc _I _am is Gee."

He tries to assure her in expression and sincere tone that "I would never play that."

"Good," she says sweetly, stroking his cheek, "because the first time you do, I'll borrow back Jethro's shillelagh to practice my golf swing."

Michelle and Ziva have the best laugh at DiNozzo's expression.

x

"Well, I should get upstairs," Siobhan says, gathering her two bags with items to give to her particular friends, hurrying out while riding high. "Time to get to work, I probably have a hundred messages waiting,"

No one warns her about what to expect. Tony, never having learned the exact limits of her sense of humor, is relieved by the woman's departure. He does, however, know what awaits her in that office and starts doing a mental countdown for how long it'll take for her phone call to come down.

"Your wife's right about one thing," Gibbs says after the elevator takes the woman away.

"What's that?"

"Time to get to _work_," he says with faux severity – this time.

"Right." McGee turns and is brought short, again, by the sight of his desk. 'So much for thinking how little things change.' He looks to Abby, standing beside him, finding her beaming with pride at her handiwork. "Thanks, but you really shouldn't have."

"Have fun, Tim," she says, gives him a quick hug and heads back to the elevator.

Tim again surveys the desk, not wanting to think of hurting his friend's feelings by boxing everything up right away. Perhaps he can just clear enough space to do some work? Maybe.

Turning on his computer, he clears his keyboard of the tiny figures that embellish it, many of them in tuxedos and wedding gowns, and signs on to his NCIS account, which he's ignored for half a month. He tries not to cringe at the vast number of emails.

But before he can open any, an entry on a list to the right of the screen catches his eye. He has a special filter which searches public news articles for references to NCIS, and ninth of ten in the list is a mild surprise. He turns to the woman at the desk to his right. "Michelle?"

"Yes, Tim?"

"What've you been doing?"

x

The question - and its tone - is enough to capture all the agents' attentions.

She shrugs, not feeling particularly guilty. Except for her participation in the three cases he'd missed; "Not a lot."

"We're gonna discuss that later," Gibbs quips in his ultra-serious, deadpan manner.

Michelle, still in her festive mood, presses her teeth together to block herself from sticking her tongue out at her boss. It may be festive, but not smart. "Why?" she settles for asking Tim.

"Guess who's trending."

She thinks it over, shrugs again. "I have no idea what trending even is."

"Greatest series of hits on the Internet. I have a filter on my system that checks for references to NCIS, and you're trending."

"I'm whatting?" It sounds like this could be slightly obscene.

"Well, I admit I stole that idea from Yahoo, but the point is that there are a more references to NCIS than I've seen in months, what's up with that? But the one with the most hits in personal names this morning is Michelle Palmer."

"You're _kidding_." She's away from her desk, comes around his and into his space and now the other agents' attentions are riveted on them. She sees that numbers one through eight on the list on the right side of the screen are apparently official or cable crime related references and probably have to do with things like 'The Real NCIS' Crime Show on TruTV, but "Number nine?" she asks, slightly deflated.

"Out of three hundred forty eight NCIS references?" Having no idea of the real figure, he throws out the number to illustrate the scale.

"Oh ... Well ... three hundred forty eight, I guess that's better." Her faux casualness is overwhelmed by anticipatory enthusiasm. "Well, so show me, show me, what do three hundred and forty eight people want with me?"

McGee grins, that hadn't been the point, but he clicks on her name and the link opens a list of links to files and websites. "Not only you; the Director, Melanie Kelman, Ziva ... Janet Levy...Kim Martin...Susan Bourne…Lisa DuBois…Tina Larsen…."

"Oh, who cares about _them_?" she smirks, fascinated. Ziva shoots her a crinkled-nose look. "Open one. I want to see what's so fascinating."

As Gibbs, Tony and Ziva look on, unable to see McGee's screen, he selects a link and it leads to a list of files. The first is a JPEG file which opens a picture on his screen. His eyes widen and his mouth falls open as Michelle stares, more deeply shocked. "Holy Mother of God," he breathes when he can say anything.

Michelle staggers backward into his partition counter, her face white.

Her shriek slices through Operations.

x

The startled agents, already half on their feet in response to McGee's whispered distress, converge behind or across McGee's overly-decorated desk to where they can see the monitor.

Michelle's scream has raised every Agent in Operations to his and her feet and, weapons drawn, they rapidly search for the reason for the cry. Palmer's pressed against the shelf of Tim's partition, almost toppling it.

On the screen, in appalling detail, Michelle sits on a cushioned stool, clothed only in a smile. Her crotch is shaved and the fingertips of her right hand touch her labia.

"Get it off! _Get it off_! GET IT OFF!"

Tim collapses the window and turns back to his panting, white-faced friend backed against his partition. Their teammates crowded about the desk are no less appalled.


	2. Offences

Chapter Two  
Offenses

"That wasn't _me_!" Michelle cries, her voice rising to a yell as she repeats it.

"We know," Gibbs holds his outrage clamped in his carefully controlled tone.

"I NEVER POSED FOR THAT!"

"Ziva." He makes his tone say what he's too angry to direct.

"Gibbs, she is not the only–"

"Take her..." he strives for enforced calm, at least in words, not releasing control of the situation, "and _yourself_ to the Conference Room."

Outraged as she is, both for the violation of her friend which she has seen and for the violation of herself that she has not, she knows the wisdom of this order. She knows what her partners have to do, and she does not want to see one disgusting second of it.

She reaches out for Michelle, not surprised to feel the fine trembling in the younger woman's shoulders. Michelle stares at the screen which displays only the NCIS logo, but her partners can see the outrageous image in her eyes. She's clutching her hands and they shake even more violently than the rest of her body. It takes Ziva two tugs, of increasing firmness, before the trembling, gasping woman can move.

As Ziva pulls her from the partition, she leans in close but her firm promise carries well into the adjacent bullpen. "Someone will die for this."

x

When the women are gone Gibbs turns to McGee, his tone driving a frigid stiletto into the man's heart. "Track down this bastard, and I don't care how you do it but you get that filth off the Internet."

"You got it."

Tim won't admit aloud - yet - his belief that it's impossible.

Gibbs stalks out of the bullpen, his furious trail figuratively casting whitecaps behind him. Approaching agents, seeing his deadly demeanor, give him a wide berth.

This has gone well beyond his own team; he'd heard the list McGee had quoted before any on them realized the outrage had been perpetrated. It's something he must bring to Director Jennifer Shepherd immediately, but there's a more demanding first stop.

xx

When he enters the Conference Room Michelle is seated at the large table, her back to the plasma screen. Ziva stands before it and the Internet link is active. On the wide screen the image of Ziva wears only an NCIS field cap and a belt with Sig at her right hip. Having heard the door open, she looks back, her eyes fiery. "I shall gouge out his eyes, rip his tongue from his mouth–"

"I know."

"before I begin to truly hurt him."

He steps to the table to where Michelle looks at neither of them. "Hey. You o–"

She whirls and leaps to her feet. "Special Agent Gibbs, if you ask me if I'm okay I will hit _you_!"

As much as Ziva's anger made him decide she won't be on the team that arrests this bastard, he's glad of Michelle's rage. In the bullpen she'd been shocked, now she's left horror and humiliation behind and has reached the place where she'll do something about whoever has violated her.

Much as he's gratified by this fire, if this assault is general among the women of NCIS, who can be involved in the investigation? Eyes locked on the petite woman's incendiary orbs, he pulls out his cell phone and presses a speed dial combination.

xx

Jennifer Shepherd pinches the bridge of her nose, tries to release the tension from eyes that have read too many reports since 0600. She'd fallen asleep last night with a small stack of case files on the bed beside her, had dreamed fitfully of the events detailed in the various reports, woke up at 0430 less rested than when she'd faded out, had gathered the stack and returned to work.

She hopes that if she can get through the final three, she can have a day slightly less stressful than yesterday was.

When her cell phone rings she pulls it from her belt and only glances at the tiny screen before thumbing it open, resigning herself to the inevitable. Who else would call her directly this early in the morning when any reasonable person clears business through Cynthia Sumner in the outer office? But Leroy Jethro Gibbs will always be unable to learn the simple niceties and she's grown tired of trying to teach him. Far better to teach a chimp to type; it can but it usually doesn't want to. "_Yes_, Jethro?"

/Need you in the Conference Room./

"Jeth–" the line has already clicked off.

x

There are a myriad of agents - all of them in fact - who would be fried in their own grease if they dared send such a curt message to their director. Shepherd, however, considers none of this. Gibbs is often impatient, occasionally capricious; he may even at times have trouble forgetting the days when she was his 'probie' under Mike Franks, but she's come to know him, and his tones, very well.

He didn't only summon her to the Conference Room. Something so terrible has happened that NCIS' Director needs to be there _now_.

xx

When Shepherd opens the Conference Room door Gibbs, David and Palmer are gathered near the large plasma screen at the right wall. Shepherd sees what they're looking at and stops dead.

Second one: The split screen has, on the left side, a picture of Michelle Palmer. She's naked, reclining on a red-sheeted bed, her legs parted slightly as she smiles invitingly at the viewer.

Second two: Ziva David, on the screen's right side, is equally naked and she's standing in another bedroom, one knee upon the bed she's getting onto. The angle offers an excellent view between her parted–

Second three: The pictures really are on the screen.

"What the _Hell _is going on?"

"McGee says he's found over five hundred pictures so far."

Shepherd won't demand of the women when - and why - they dared pose for these outrageous offenses. Both Agents are angrier than they are ashamed.

She focuses on Gibbs rather than the images, he's letting her see through his normally shielded eyes into his soul; he put these up because this isn't just a case - this is personal.

He touches a button on the plasma screen's remote control and the split screen images change. Cynthia Sumner sits at her desk, blouse and bra nowhere in sight. There are words, barely distinguishable, in the lower right corner; without her reading glasses Jennifer can't make them out and doesn't care what the tiny letters say.

Janet Levy from Kevin Lamb's team lies upon a beach, palm trees decorate the background but only a few grains of sand decorate her body.

x

Another change and dark Nikki Jardine stands strapped at wrists and ankles to a large brown bondage X cross and a black whip cuts a bloody line across her left breast. Beside her, blonde Tina Larsen closes some room's drapes, a promising smile on her lips, one hand too close to her shaven pubes, her vagina too visible.

Again a change and Jennifer's anger peaks as she sees _herself _in her office seated slightly sideways on the edge of her desk, her left foot upon the desktop and her close-shaved vagina's moisture catches the light to display her readiness. On the right Siobhan O'Mallory - no, _McGee _now - stands before a green-fronted Altar of a church that's not Saint Mary the Virgin and there's nothing virginal about her pose. Her only garment is the two inch high stiff white collar that circles her throat.

"_Enough_!" The screen blackens before the reverberation fades. The silence that replaces it seems still only because outrage allows room for nothing more.

Before any of them can break the tableau, Gibbs' phone yells. He pulls it out, his acknowledgement more curt than usual. It's a short exchange but his answer is even shorter. "No, give it to Lamb. Higgins, then. We're _busy_." His disgusted look sours further.

"What is it?" Shepherd asks.

From his expression she can see he evidently realizes he should've passed it on to her immediately.

"Marine Corporal shot on N Street Northeast, between 14 & 15."

"Take it." She weathers the trio of outraged glares. "Your team is compromised on this."

"_Every _team is compromised on this."

"I'll worry about who catches this ball, you deal with that shooting."

She considers silent resentment as better than insubordination and meets their eyes as the three walk past her, tries to convey reassurance while thinking quickly about who wouldn't have an emotional stake in this case.

There's no one.

She's not detached either, not after seeing that horrid monstrosity of herself upon the screen. She hopes she doesn't have to restructure teams, but that choice will depend on who can separate outrage from duty, who can investigate this case dispassionately - the victims or the victims' partners.

She glares at the blackened plasma screen. "I'll be damned if this goes to the FBI."

xx

When Gibbs leads the two silent, furious women back into the bullpen, his "Gear up!" command cuts into the two angry men at their stations like a whip-snap.

"Someone find the perp already?" DiNozzo demands, incredulous but gratified, looking forward to grappling with the creator of the filth he reduces from his monitor screen.

"Not our case," Gibbs snaps, reaching into his desk drawer for his weapon as the women gather their own equipment. He slaps the magazine into his Sig. "Marine shot on N Northwest, 14 to 15."

Tony, shoving his Sig into his holster, can't look at the two furious women, remember the outrages he's seen, and believe this. "But, Boss–"

The glare that mutes him carries the hot message: 'Not ours so shut up or be very sorry.'

DiNozzo looks to his partners, sorry for them instead.


	3. Scene of the Crime

Chapter Three  
Scene of the Crime

Not a word is spoken as Gibbs' Charger, with Ziva riding shotgun and Michelle in the back seat, leads the MCR truck on a rapid course through the streets of Washington. Before they'd left Headquarters, they'd learned that there are two people shot on N street in Northeast DC. A civilian is dead but the Marine, their assigned focus, is wounded and MPDC units, together with an ambulance and the City Medical Examiner, are on site. When they turn onto N street they find it blocked by police and other emergency vehicles and nearly the middle third of the left sidewalk is cordoned off with yellow Crime Scene tape.

Gibbs's car and the Major Case Response Team truck must be parked at the outer edge of the scene.

On the sidewalk is a large white sheet barely heavy enough to keep from being dislodged by the wind, the area at the uppermost bump in the material is surrounded by blood stain. There's a large irregular red pool a few feet closer to the building, the agents withhold speculation that this belongs to the second victim until they gather their own information. Crime Scene technicians and officers examine and record everything within the secured area, but the NCIS agents make no attempt to enter the scene, for Gibbs has already located his target.

x

Standing just within the area where the tape is anchored to an MPDC EMS truck is a tall, sandy haired man wearing a blue suit and open trench coat. It and his hair flutter sharply in the sustained wind. Gibbs leads the stalk toward Detective Lieutenant Jeffrey Carpenter.

"Took Nickis long enough to get here, LeeJay," the thin man says when the group is close enough for his words not to carry beyond them. Private humor loses something when heard by bystanders. "Sensors triangulated on the gunshot; it's a great system, no need to wait for a 911." He's also not inclined to let the general public know too much about the gunshot sensors mounted throughout the city. "First unit got here in about four minutes. Your guy's already gone."

Gibbs has already seen that and he'll hear more about his 'guy' later, once he had an idea of what's going on. "What've you got, Carp?"

Rather than answering directly, the tall detective beckons to a woman in black pants and a red blouse who stands on the north side of the area speaking to two uniformed officers. The attire might suggest civilian, her eyes do not. On arrival, back to the wind, she must hold her short black hair in place and she immediately moves around to the opposite side of the men, putting their backs to the wind. The agents had last seen Dr. Jordan Hampton a fortnight ago at the McGees' wedding and reception. This reunion isn't as pleasant.

x

"What's the word, Doc?" Carpenter asks.

The look she gives him says quite eloquently that she's already given him 'the word', so she turns to the assembled agents who now raise and duck under the tape, her eyes giving the greetings that voice cannot before she tells them: "Paul Kensington, white male Caucasian, approximately 40 years of age, single shot to the head, through and through. It looks like your man caught the round in his upper left thigh; missed the femoral artery, fortunately. Could be some skull shrapnel in the wound, I don't know, EMTs were taking him to International Medical when I rolled up."

Gibbs is familiar with that facility; it's barely eight blocks distant. "EMTs First Responders?"

"No, and here your man's lucky." She turns slightly and points up the street to a brown haired woman speaking with two other officers beside a patrol car beyond the secured zone. "Nurse Tremont was walking across the street," she points to the large building opposite them, "when she heard the shot. Kensington was dead but she got your man, who's in civvies by the way and I didn't get his name, stabilized and the bleeding stopped."

McGee, at Gibbs' signal, leaves, sharing a quick glance with Hampton, much personal communication shared in that fleeting instant. He crosses the enclosed area to where the woman, wearing a blue blouse and slacks, is apparently finishing giving her statement to the officers; the younger one is putting his pad into his shirt. McGee offers her a mental apology as he displays his shield and ID to the officers; the woman will have to begin her story again.

x

Jeffrey Carpenter turns to the agents. "Guess, LeeJay, that you'll want to be going on to International Medical to interview your Marine. He's Lance Corporal Harold Campbell. We sent his ID along with him." It's a friendly but not too subtle hint that this case is MPDC's, with Nickis' involvement only peripheral.

"Just as soon as we sample the blood." Gibbs' tone isn't as empty or cool as he'd offer to another officer. He's glad for the fact that Carpenter and he understand one another so well, no need for him to hear how MPDC CSI has already sampled the blood, no need for him to reply how little that fact means to NCIS' investigation. "You got the bullet?"

Carpenter's eyes flicker to the Crime Scene truck; no need to say either that Metro has the round and is keeping it. He also sees Ziva David has an Evidence kit in her hand as she steps toward the building wall.

".44 caliber, a serious slug," Carpenter says in answer to Gibbs' question, removing his attention from the comely woman as she walks away. Gibbs notes the man has barely glanced at Michelle – she's married. "When it went through Campbell's left leg it bounced off the wall and wound up at 12." He indicates one of the yellow plastic triangles, this one on their far left within the zone. It now indicates the position of nothing except perhaps a few spots of blood too tiny to see from here.

Gibbs' eyes trace back along the admittedly extremely uncertain trajectory from the bullet's location to a visible mark on the building wall, past where the Marine's upper leg would probably be in the even more imprecise area of the blood pool Ziva is examining, past where a man of uncertain height's head might be and to any of three buildings, seven and nine stories tall. It's a lot of area to search for brass or other evidence and he's content to let MPDC do it.

He turns to his remaining agents. "Palmer, photos, DiNozzo, sketches." That's as much as they can do until he gets McGee's report and they finally interview Campbell in the hospital.

"It's good to see you again," Jordan Hampton interjects before the agents split up.

"You too, Doctor," Gibbs says for them, sparing a moment for the niceties.

"How's Ducky?"

"Fine."

"He sends his love," DiNozzo inserts. Gibbs' half-glare and Hampton's grin acknowledge that the man had done no such thing. With no Serviceman's death, Ducky wouldn't even know they're in the field.

"We'll bring him yours," Michelle assures her.

"Thank you, Michelle."

x

As the group breaks up, Michelle turns back toward the MCRT truck and the smile crashes off her face as she considers the hours to come. She doesn't get more than a step before Gibbs' voice, from very close, halts her.

"Hey." When she turns he's directly behind her, she must look up into his grim eyes. "NCIS is going to do right by all of you."

"Tha–" he's already turned to examine the covered corpse, pooled blood and damage to the wall. "ank you, sir"

xx

When Gibbs arrives on the outer edge of the scene McGee, standing at the extended yellow tape with the shorter woman, is putting his pad into his pants pocket. He'll remind him later about having accessible pockets rather than the white cable knit sweater, but right now he can't fault him for the garment as the sustained wind blows the remnant of winter away.

Tremont's expression reflects sustained annoyance, not all of which is directed toward the need to hold her long black hair against the whipping wind. McGee makes a brief introduction between witness and investigator, presenting Nurse Judy Tremont, but it's Gibbs' expression of uncertain familiarity that McGee notices.

"You remember, Boss, Nurse Tremont was a witness to Special Agent White's murder." That had been several months ago. "SSA Higgins had her in protective custody."

"That's what _you _call it," Tremont snaps. "I call it being locked up as your prisoner." Gibbs recognizes her now from the interview footage he'd studied relevant to that nightmarish ordeal when, over the course of several horrendous days, nine agents had been murdered at the hands of the McGillicuddy, Crocetti and Morrison spy ring, part of a conspiracy that had climaxed in the hijack of the USS Millennium.

"Just so we're clear, I am _not _a witness. I was across the street. I rendered aid but I have no idea who shot those men. I didn't see them get shot, I didn't see who shot them. I am _not_ a witness."

"Okay," Gibbs agrees.

"Oh. Well. Then. Okay." Gibbs and McGee consider her suitably flustered. She'd undoubtedly been anticipating, or dreading, more detailed interviews. She hadn't stood up well under the last set so many months ago, but this time Gibbs doubts she'll need protective custody. "Are we done here?" she asks testily, regaining her poise.

"Just a few questions," Gibbs assures her, reading in her body language how much she wants to be gone.

"I–" She bites it off, evidently doesn't like the taste. "It's one thing to be a 'Good Samaritan', another to be here nearly an hour answering _questions _about it."

"We're sorry for that." Though he's not, he says it placatingly enough to win a sigh rather than a snarl.

x

"Yeah, I know." Tremont sounds defeated, seems to give in to the inevitable. "Okay, I was across the street," she points toward the building to her left, "when I heard a _bang _that echoed up and down the block and I ducked. I hid beside a parked car, I know a gunshot when I hear it and this one was loud as hell and I didn't know if _I_ was going to get shot at next. But I heard nothing else after a couple of seconds, maybe half a minute? I looked up and _two _men were lying on the sidewalk. There were a lot of people closer but I know what to do - I'm a nurse - so when no one moved and no one shot anyone else I ran across to help." She takes a moment, tries to wrap her brown hair into a tail; it fights her so she again just settles for holding it.

"The guy closest to me, his head was - well, he was dead but the guy nearer the building was moving, clutching his left leg. I yelled for someone, there were about a dozen gawkers, to call 911 while I went and did what I could for him. The blood wasn't arterial - I saw that before I even got down – no spurt, so I got the bleeding under control, though I had nothing but his handkerchief and my pack of Kleenex," she glances down and points to the bloodstained purse at her feet.

"When I looked up again I was alone. I did a minute of cursing while I kept him still, worked on his leg and told him to feel free to scream his head off since I didn't have anything but Tylenol." She shakes her head, almost in wonder.

"He gritted and hung on, and it was maybe a minute or two later before I heard the first siren." She shrugs, not letting go of her disheveled hair, her manner saying they probably know more now than she does.

Gibbs glances at McGee, gets the agent's signal that he has the details and her contact information. "Thank you, Nurse. We're sorry to have detained you."

"Well, you know what they say, 'no good deed goes unpunished'."

They can't agree. "We'll be in touch if we need anything else."

"Do me a favor - _don't _call me at home."

"I have your cell number," McGee assures her.

"Well," firm determination dissolves into an awkward "Goodbye." Picking up her purse, she walks away down the street.

x

When she's out of range, McGee says "Her, er, husband won't like that she was talking to NCIS." Gibbs's eyes press the question. "He was Dishonorably Discharged for Assaulting an Officer in Kabul, got three years, out one now."

"Got off lucky." Gibbs doesn't care.

"Boss?"

Gibbs knows what's on McGee's mind; it's been on his all morning. "We'll interview Corporal Campbell, but until I know otherwise, he sounds like Collateral Damage on Carpenter's case."

"Yes, boss."

They leave it unsaid that if Campbell is an accidental victim they'll get back to their own case - as much as Shepherd will allow. She's probably already chosen the Lead Team, but Gibbs has a promise to keep. He looks from the Crime Scene beyond the younger man and then to him.

"Happy to be back?" He hears in McGee's hesitation that he's looking for a diplomatic answer.

"Ireland was great."


	4. The Sword Shall Pierce Your Heart Also

Chapter Four  
The Sword Shall Pierce Your Heart Also

It was nearly two hours later, two frustrating hours with nothing more to do and nowhere to go before the agents could interview Marine Corporal Harold Campbell in the Recovery Room following his operation. The treatment to repair the damage from the bullet that had gone through his leg had not been critical, so he was awake and alert when the agents saw him - but he had even fewer details about what had happened to him than Lieutenant Carpenter, Doctor Hampton and Nurse Tremont had provided.

While Gibbs and DiNozzo interviewed Campbell, David and Palmer obtained his medical information to share with the Corps and document the shooting for further action. McGee had already used his PDA as a computer link with NCIS' records to look into Campbell's history in the vanishingly small chance that he, rather than Paul Kensington, had been the shooter's intended target.

Campbell had served two tours in Afghanistan and is on a two week Leave visiting his parents and girlfriend prior to assignment in Kuwait.

That deployment will be delayed for several weeks.

"Wanna know the real irony?" Campbell had asked Gibbs at the close of the interview. "Three guys from my Unit were injured, one got shipped back with no left hand but I never got more than a couple of bruised ribs over there. Looks like my luck ran out."

"No, Corporal, Paul Kensington's did."

xxx

When the agents return to Headquarters Gibbs leads the way, as always, from the elevator, but when the doors close again he's unsurprised to find his team is one short. He glances back, not needing Tony's report that, when the man had let Ziva and Michelle precede him off the car, McGee hadn't exited.

"Okay," is all Gibbs has to say, knowing the new husband's destination. He can't fault him. He'll fault him later.

It's eight minutes to noon, and as they cross Operations to the bullpen two things are glaringly obvious. The tension that suffuses the building is smothering; the men they pass are grim and angry, the women show these feelings far more intensely. The second thing of note is that, throughout the Operations Division the latter agents are making their collective way to the stairs leading to the upper balcony.

Special Agent Susan Hollander waves to the arriving team as she passes, a 'come on' gesture. "You're just in time," she says, addressing Ziva and Michelle, "the Director's called a noon meeting in MTAC."

Tony, halfway through the entrance to the bullpen, diverts and takes a step out toward the stairs.

"_Women only_," Hollander snaps, but when Gibbs' turns a hard glare upon her she realizes that, in her stress, she's drastically violated protocol. L. Jethro Gibbs may head a Major Case Response Team and work the field by his own choice but he _is _the Deputy Special Agent-in-Charge, second in rank only to the Director and is not someone whose team a Document Examiner snaps at. "Excuse me, sir, I'm sorry, but something serious has happened. If you don't know about it yet, it's not my place to tell but the Director wants to see all female Agents–"

"Go," he tells Ziva and Michelle. To DiNozzo, when they're gone, he has a different order, one he knows is more suited to McGee's skills but he'll direct him later. For now, DiNozzo can start to "Take the Internet apart."

xx

McGee, on the fourth floor, stands before a door only distinguishable from its fellows by a discrete, new shingle on the wall beside it. The new two line white on brown plate, installed sometime during their sojourn in the Emerald Isle, reads 'S. McGee' and 'Chaplain'.

Tim raps four times on the door, a moment later three, then two. By the time he knocks the final time the door is already pulling away from his hand and the light in the hall seems to him to flash far more brightly as his lovely wife smiles at him.

She reaches up, her arms about his neck as she pulls him into a kiss. It's quite a few seconds before she draws back, clearly not wanting to. "Hoigh, a stór," she greets him delightedly, "I was wondering when you'd come."

She can, Tim thinks, make 'hi, my darling' sound so romantic, and though he's learned almost enough for a short conversation, she'll use their native tongue only for the special. She's been teaching him for those times when they may have private conversations in public. There's nothing of the broad double-entendre in her tone that she'd hit him with if they were alone; for she can't see up or down the hallway and she has an image and reputation to maintain, even though she can now receive him in this room without reservation. The brightness in her smile and in her emerald eyes make clear how well she'd like to receive him.

"Coming to take me to lunch?" she asks, happy anticipation alight in her eyes.

"Are you okay?"

Her smile almost falters in her surprise. His tone is so grim, so tense, so... "Of course I'm okay. Why wouldn't I be?"

"Well..."

"Tar isteach," she invites with an anticipatory grin so at odds with what's happening. It's like _she _knows something _he _doesn't rather than the other way about. But she couldn't be this happy, this care free, if she knew what's happening.

He enters, uncertain how to say it. "It's just tha–" The first thing that hits him is the floral scent, then his eyes bulge, his mouth falls open and for several seconds he can't force anything out. Ultimately, the best he can force in an astounded breath is "Good … Lord..."

"I'm letting it stay _today_, only so I can tell Abby I didn't take it all down right away." She closes the door behind him. "But I'm coming back in the morning and boxing _everything_."

x

Abby Sciuto, in her enthusiasm, had turned his desk downstairs into a veritable Mardi Gras float of ribbons, banners, streamers, bunting, balloons, tinsel and signs until Gibbs had called a halt to the madness on the third day of their two week absence. He hadn't had time this morning to do more than clear himself a workspace on that desk.

Undeterred by Gibbs' command Abby, with what the McGees don't know yet was Michelle Palmer's increasingly reluctant help, had turned her enthusiastic imagination loose on this enclosed room with gusto and glee.

When the couple had left for Ireland the room had contained only one long brown leather couch at the right wall, a desk and executive chair facing the far wall, upon which was mounted a single distinctive crucifix brought over the day after the wedding from her bedroom in the Rectory and installed over the desk, a clock/radio, a computer and a trio of filing cabinets standing at the left wall. Siobhan believes in sending the message to her visitors that there is nothing to distract her from them.

The room now has the same density of decoration as his desk downstairs but with over twenty times the volume. To that stunning total had been added streamers hung with silver and gold tassels that crisscross the ceiling and hung with multihued tassels while layers of inverted arches circle the walls before them. Posters vie with wedding and reception pictures for space on the walls and a tremendous 'Congratulations' banner dominates the far wall above the desk, while ribbons and rosettes and stars and hearts and artistic flowers and bunting and streamers turn the room into a staggering kaleidoscope of color. Blinking Christmas lights frame every wall and the filing cabinets like a madwoman's re-envisioning of the set of 'Tron', but Tim sees that the colored flashers that line the desk's top, front and legs have been unplugged. When Tim looks back over his shoulder, the inner side of the door is elaborately gift wrapped in silver foil with wide gold ribbons that join into a tremendous rosette.

As the coup de grâce of this mad excursion into the land of the demented decorator, Abby has filled the room with enough flowers of every conceivable - and a few inconceivable - hues to outfit a medium-sized forest, stunning in their collective scent.

Siobhan doesn't know that Gibbs had given Abby one instruction: 'At least leave her enough room to open the door'. Gibbs doesn't know - yet - how near a thing it had been.

The room is longer than it is wide and the effect is that of walking into a kaleidoscope.

x

It takes Tim several moments to rip his eyes from the maelstrom of color to his wife, who tells him "I used to think Abby had an encyclopedic mind. Now I'm wondering where else in the encyclopedia I'll find her."

"She means well." 'Sometimes a bit too well?' he wonders. 'And did she clean out Bill Rolonio's Florist Shop?'

"Oh, I know she does. She just ..." Siobhan looks over the stationary parade again, "scares me a little sometimes."

He smiles, well acquainted with the feeling. "Abby is as close to love personified as anyone I've ever met – except you," he catches himself quickly and surveys the room again. "Enthusiasm, ditto."

But then he remembers the importance of his visit and the world dims for him again. "Shav, no one called you?"

She shrugs, explaining "No. I'm sorry but when I got in there were seventeen messages – most people didn't call because they knew I was away," she points to her still-blinking answering machine half-buried under the decorations; she doesn't use NCIS voice mail due to the private nature of her work. "Before we left I recorded a new message letting people know I was out until today and why. Everyone here already knew, but the only messages that _did_ get recorded were from people in Norfolk, Little Creek and so forth. I turned off the phone's ringer to give me a chance to catch up but I've been working my way through the calls one at a time, calling people back and–"

"So no one's seen, well, obviously no one's seen you." He can tell _that_ by her good mood. "You've been up here all this time–"

"Timmy," she cuts him off as he had her, apprehension lighting her eyes, "you're starting to scare me. What's happened?"

"Well, I - that is - it's really–"

Her sudden grip on his arm is like a vice. "Who _died_?"

"No one."

Relief very briefly washes through her. Death is the only problem that can't be solved, but what's distressing the man who'd driven into work with her, filled with joyous anticipation, just this morning? "Timmy, tell me."

"You'd better sit down."

Her initial reaction is to say she doesn't want to sit down, but if it'll get the answer out faster she pulls him to the couch and down beside her.

x

"Ever hear of faking?" he asks. Her expression tells him how mystifying this explanation is. "Photo manipulation, putting someone's head onto someone else's body."

"You mean like those websites do to actresses?" She's seen enough of that disgusting practice, knows there has to be a million such perversions out there. "Why?"

"Someone … someone did that. They took face shots of …." He stops. All morning they've dealt with it and it still doesn't seem real. "Someone took pictures of our female Agents and put them onto … well, you get the idea."

"I'm beginning to…." What had she ignored, what appeals for aid had she missed in so complacently silencing her phone except for her own outgoing calls so she could 'catch up', mostly with Agents in the field, saving the Headquarters calls that would go to the machine unheard for last? "What happened? And to who? Tell me everything."

It takes him a few seconds before he can say "Someone got hold of facial photos; we're not sure from where, of a lot of our female agents, grafted them onto nude bodies and posted them all over the web."

"Oh, Lord." What must her friends be dealing with? What kind of…? "Whose?" He's silent for a moment, for too long. She knows that stop. He doesn't want to say it. "_Whose_?"

"Everyone's." She feels cold rush through her. "We're not sure where they came from, Tony thinks someone hacked into HR files, or maybe Pass and ID records, but it looks like it's everyone's."

x

The cold centers into a hand that grips her heart. No. This can't … he doesn't mean…. "Everyone's?" He nods. She doesn't want him to nod, nor to see that look in his eyes. The frigid hand clutches her heart tighter, cold blood shoots through her. "But _I_–"

"_Everyone's_."

That ice fist crushes her heart. She can barely breathe, her chest heaving with the effort to drag in air. "Ohhh – oh my God." She blesses herself, her hand shaking. "Oh my God, you're saying…?"

"Yes."

x

She stares into his eyes – 'please be joking' – but there's no joke – he'd never joke about something like this. That icy hand rips her heart. She sees deeper sympathy behind barely contained outrage and has to get up, has to get off this couch, can't face him. She stands, back to him, trembling. She can't turn and he doesn't try to follow.

"What did they…?" She can't say it. If she says it it'll be real and this _can't _be real. Their honeymoon just ended. They've been back for hours - they haven't even _unpacked_. This can't be happening.

No.

No. She was tired, she came in and the overwhelming reception every time they met friends along the way … and these flowers, they made her fall asleep making callbacks. She's asleep at her desk, overcome by pollen poisoning, floral overload, something; kaleidoscopic vertigo. They'll find her slumped over the desk this evening and

"I am so sorry, honey."

She turns around, looks down into his sad face. "_Please _tell me you're making this up." Even as she says it, she knows it's impossible. Timmy would _never_–

"I _can't_."

She goes to her chair, sits down, turns away from him to the desk, to the wall. All the insanity that's come into her life since NCIS first touched it, was she an idiot to think getting married would change anything?

But then her gaze falls on, or is pulled to, the crucifix before her. Jesus' hands aren't nailed to this wood. His arms reach out to her. Reach out.

Reach out.

She stands quickly. "I have to get out there. They need me."

"Shav, _you _need–"

"_No_!" She pulls it back, ropes it down; remembers to whom she's speaking. "I have to go out there where I'm needed. This isn't about me, this is about my duty." She turns to him and realizes she's shaking. "A chuisle, later I'll need you to hold me while I scream and cry, but this isn't the time."

She crosses the room into his embrace, tries to hide how much she wants to lose herself in it, to bathe in its security.

She doesn't want him to let her go, so she's the one who has to push away.


	5. Outrage

Chapter Five  
Outrage

In MTAC seats have long since filled up, deference given to SSAs Melanie Kelman, Terry Leigh and Rosemary Hauss, Forensic Scientist Abby Sciuto and others of particular rank, the rest of the seats available to first comers. Director Shepherd and Cynthia Sumner stand before the huge view screen and late arrivals take what space they can, squeezing into the rapidly overcrowding room. The last arrivals must remain on the ramps, Shepherd's manner silently declares the center area before the view screen to be hers. The emotions that fill the room range from fervent curiosity from those few who do not yet know through tightly bottled, incandescent rage from those who do.

"That's all of them?" Shepherd asks tersely.

Sumner, who knows who's on RDO or in the Field, nods curtly. "Just about."

"Close enough." If many more women try to squeeze into the room no one will be able to move and she wants buffer space so she can see everyone's faces. "Shut the doors," she calls to the women in the rear. "The others can come in quietly. Lights up." The woman controlling the room's operation manipulates switches and the assembled agents see something rarely witnessed other than by special technicians; MTAC's lights radiating at 160 watts.

Shepherd's voice is filtered through the slim headset she slips on, making her amplified words snap through the packed room like a whip. "What I'm going to say will make all of you angry. You _will _maintain professional decorum." She watches the wonder that she must give this command filter through the packed room as the reverberation fades, and she pauses for a moment before speaking.

x

"Three days ago violations of the most personal sort began appearing on the Internet. I am sure you will appreciate the viral nature of these and understand how widespread the ... contamination is becoming. Abby?"

The Forensic Scientist, her mood blacker than her clothing, has been waiting in the front row for her presentation. She's on her feet immediately; outrage rather than her characteristic élan lending speed to her movements as she steps beside Shepherd.

"I won't wish you a good afternoon because it isn't. Many of you have seen the pictures that have assaulted us - those who haven't yet were lucky but your luck has run out."

"_Abby_," Shepherd says between gritted teeth.

"I'm _getting _to it," she replies as tightly. She doesn't look at Shepherd again, but addresses her even tenser audience.

"You've all heard of photo manipulation or 'faking'. In short, it's sticking heads, usually of celebrities, onto corresponding _nude _bodies that're posed in all sorts of obscene, tasteless poses only perverts consider erotic." She sees that nearly all the women are either ahead of her already or keeping very close. "To give the short, short version," she doesn't want to say it, hates having no choice, "we've all been faked."

"_Why_?"

x

Abby won't try to identify who was driven by a maelstrom of emotion to demand this, she wants the answer too. "I don't know, but a lot of our fellow Agents are working on identifying who."

"While looking at naked pictures of _us_," another voice Abby won't look toward exclaims.

"Not us," another of the outraged agents counters hotly.

"Fantasy images of _us_," someone else's voice broils.

"Like that's better?" the first protestor demands volcanically.

"_ENOUGH_!" Shepherd's amplified command, the whip-snap of her voice, cuts all of them. She hadn't wanted to use the microphone, had counted on her peoples' professional discipline, but though disappointed she can't fault her associates, many of them her friends. This is an especially stressful, brutally intrusive assault and the abuse is only beginning.

She fears what NCIS may become before this ends.

Further, the information she's about to give them will stress these women far more than they've already been taxed. She could have the Agents from the Legal Department give them the information, but this is not a task she can pass on to others. She briefly flashes back to the hostage drama in Gibbs' bullpen a month ago and the use of 'Bellerophon' as a coded message. This, however, is a true Bellerophonic message, for the bearer will incur the hatred of everyone in the chamber.

"The faking is legal."

x

Utter silence greets this pronouncement and Shepherd has time to signal the prearranged image to be brought up on the screen behind her. It's a magnification of the lower right section of a picture. 'This is a fake, an artistic parody currently protected under the U.S. Constitution. This fake is the result of digital manipulation of two or more different pictures. This fake is not intended to represent an actual photo of the individual(s) depicted. FAKE, A PHOTO MANIPULATION.'

"This is the reason celebrities who are hit find it so hard to stop this abuse," Shepherd tells the outraged agents gathered before her.

"I haven't seen this," Karen Richardson declares. She's one of the few who had learned of the incident while still at her desk.

At Shepherd's signal the image shoots out and out and out, more and more of the nude body becoming visible. The head has been deleted in consideration of the victim, but when the entire image is visible on MTAC's huge screen, the body is explicitly posed and the disclaimer can barely be distinguished on the lower right edge of the film.

"You can't see that!" Alyson Sterling cries the outrage of three score women.

"But it is there, that makes it legal," Shepherd's voice drives all others to appalled silence.

The agents are torn between their desire to decry the unfairness of this plot and their own knowledge of the law and their oaths to uphold it.

xxx

Downstairs, in Operations, McGee has returned to work at Siobhan's urging. She'd said she needed to spend a few minutes alone before coming out of her office, to prepare herself mentally and spiritually for helping her 'charges'; but he suspects it's to send him back to work identifying the culprit - the 'bastard' he thinks for her who will not say it - who did this.

He was mildly surprised to find the cavernous room half empty. Gibbs, after succinctly bringing him up to date on the reason for the women's absence, assigns him to work with DiNozzo to trace the various locations where their fellow agent's images are displayed and where the images had come from.

"Probie?" DiNozzo calls about five minutes later.

McGee turns at the odd tone that layers his partner's voice, and as their eyes meet a dozen messages flash between them. Then McGee opens a shared file upon his monitor. It takes only a few moments before he says in dead tones "I see it."

"I hate being wrong," DiNozzo gripes.

"You'd rather be right?" McGee counters grimly.

DiNozzo had started with the premise that the hackers had broken through the Navy's encryption codes and obtained Personnel records. Bad enough, but they would be dealing with one image per woman. A look at the many faces displayed on the nude shots had quickly destroyed this theory.

This discovery is worse.

"One of you had better say something now," Gibbs warns. They turn to him, stricken to silence. So often it's a race to communicate information, to be one up on the other; sometimes among the team it's a four-way battle to see who can get the most revelations across.

Now each wants the other to win.

x

"I found thirteen sites," DiNozzo admits, keeping a tight grip on facts to avoid feelings, "that have pictures of NCIS agents in 'various compromising states'."

Gibbs recognizes what's behind the overly formal, toneless wording. Still... "Thirteen?" There had been _six_ before they'd left to deal with the Kensington / Campbell shooting.

"Apparently they share."

"And from what I've found," McGee says, "this has been going on longer than three days."

"_How long_?"

'Bite the bullet,' McGee thinks reluctantly. "A couple of weeks, excluding preparation time." Gibbs' glare is his 'you'd better give me more detail' one. "I identified an early post on one site that's a month old."

"_Where'd they get them_?"

"Well, boss, these are like the ones we found on Leher's computer back in January, remember?" It's obvious from his expression that Gibbs recalls this all too well. McGee wants to forget that whole nightmare. "They're blends of our agents' faces with other bodies, adjusting for matching skin tones. Some are really exquisite work."

DiNozzo looks for a fox hole to dive into.

x

"_Exquisite_, McGee?"

"Well, no, I mean I–"

"You are so lucky they're all up in MTAC, McSuicide."

"While you're down here with _me_." If Gibbs' voice were his sniper's weapon...

"We think we know where they got the pictures."

"_Where_?"

"'We'," DiNozzo announces.

"What?"

For an instant DiNozzo is tempted to say 'not what, we', but he bites back the suicidal remark barely in time. "'We' magazine, boss." He works quickly at his computer and in seconds a picture of Michelle Palmer smiles out at them from the plasma screen between his and McGee's desks. Her shoulders and upper chest are bare but the image is discretely cropped, reaching just low enough to show the silver 5 pointed star within a circle and the cross within the star, the emblem of her combined faith. The jewel is distinctive, a unique item her husband had commissioned for her months ago as an Engagement present. The background is a headboard in some bedroom.

There is no way Michelle can ever deny the nude image is actually of her.

"Besides the necklace, note the hair," Tony directs.

Normally the woman wears her long, jet black hair down and ethnically straight, but this style is a permed wave that extends just past her shoulders. "She had herself dolled up for the photo shoot and it fell apart about two weeks later, after she got back from the Haunted House party. Now look."

The image moves to the left and beside it appears another. This time Palmer's wearing a white blouse, her silver Wiccan star necklace framed by the discrete V. "This is the picture 'We' magazine published."

Though the background is the partition wall behind her desk, the images are identical.

x

Several weeks ago, while NCIS had been overwhelmed dealing with the debacle of the USS Millennium and the fallout of that disaster which had devastated the Navy, 'We' magazine reporters and photographers had descended upon Headquarters to fulfill a contracted shoot for a then-proposed feature article 'The Women of NCIS'. It was to be part of an entire magazine special edition on 'Women Crime Fighters in the Military'. The issue focused not only on NCIS but Army CID, Air Force OSI, and the Coast Guard's CGIS.

For a full day photographers had taken scores of pictures of every woman in Headquarters, most of whom were featured in the article with two inch images beside bio-sketches. The larger shots were reserved for women of rank, such as the Director, Department Heads like Abby Sciuto and Supervisory Special Agents Melanie Kelman, Terry Leigh and Rosemary Hauss. The other three Services had received the same degree of distinction.

At the time it had been a PR coup, the brainchild of an enthusiastic promoter, and had been very well received. It had definitely been an excellent promotion for the Agencies and an ego-boost for all those published in the National magazine. A single picture had been used for each agent, but better than twenty times that many had been taken of each woman.

"It looks like no good idea, or deed, goes unpunished," DiNozzo concludes grimly.


	6. We Did It

Chapter Six  
We Did It

Tim McGee wants very much to contest DiNozzo's contention about the punishment for good deeds - his wife has done much to enhance his world view - but looking at the true and false images of his partner, both equally compelling, he can't force the objection out.

"What happened?" Gibbs demands, crossing the bullpen to the plasma screen between DiNozzo and McGee's desks, upon which the original and doctored pictures of Michelle Palmer are displayed side-by-side. The right image has her true self while on the left one displays bare shoulders and discreet upper chest and the background is a headboard. The smile that had been pleasant in the original now appears overly inviting.

Gibbs doesn't notice the doors to MTAC on the overhead balcony open and every female agent who had crowded into the room exit on a wave of outrage, for his words crack through the Division. "'_We_' published nude pictures of our people on the web?"

"_WHAT_?" The enraged cry from above snares their attentions and they look up into a sea of furious faces. "_YOU _DID THIS?"

"Probie," DiNozzo says through nearly frozen lips, "you run left, I'll take right, Gibbs take the rear stairs." His vision of ultimate doom jars as Gibbs' hand slams the back of his head.

"Wait 'till we get down there," Sally Knevet declares as several women lead the charge to the stairs, "we'll show you hitting!"

"_Stand down_!" Jennifer Shepherd's command cracks through the huge room. "Nobody moves from this platform!" She pushes through the throng above Operations and reaches the stairs, breaks past those incensed agents who'd made it that far, descends to the third floor alone and stalks up to Gibbs. "Jethro, explain this before Agent DiNozzo's a dead man."

It's a measure of the man's standing that she hadn't considered McGee's or Gibbs' guilt.

"Hey!" Shepherd turns her deadly glare on him. "Ma'am. Director."

"Much as I'd appreciate seeing DiNozzo get the beat-down he's been earning for years," Gibbs tells her and then raises his voice to be heard throughout Operations, "the we is 'We' magazine. We identified the source of the head shots as the ones from that 'Women of NCIS' segment, and suspect the other Agencies in that 'Women Crime Fighters in the Military' issue are dealing with this same thing." He directs Shepherd's attention to the previously unnoticed dual images on the plasma screen where Michelle Palmer still looks out at them, the image where she's clothed in a white blouse with her partition wall as a background and the discreetly cropped one that extends to bare upper chest and the background is a bed's headboard.

"_Damn_." Months ago, against her initial inclination, she'd signed off on that PR project and had then returned her full attention to the mounting USS Millennium disaster. She turns back to Gibbs. "You're sure."

"Looks like it."

She glances up at nearly three score angry faces, then back to her Deputy SAIC. "Report when you're sure. Then I'll get on to the other Directors."

"Yes, Ma'am."

xx

The crowd of infuriated agents dispersed with distrustful glares directed at the three men and they, Ziva and Michelle resumed their places, each having no doubt their investigation would be duplicated in departments throughout the building. DiNozzo had killed the images on the plasma screen before anyone saw them.

"Palmer, I want a warrant for every piece of film and computer equipment 'We' magazine has."

The confirmation isn't long in coming. Within twenty minutes McGee calls out, "Boss, dozens of published facial images from that magazine article are duplicated as a porn photo-manipulation on the web - including _Shav_!" he finishes unnecessarily, his bite sharper than they've ever heard from him.

DiNozzo realizes that this morning he might've been ready with a devastating quip about strangers having more nude photos of the Probie's new wife than he has.

Now it's not funny.

x

"You got the name of that photographer?"

"Four photographers; I have them."

"Palmer," Gibbs calls, but the woman isn't at her desk, she's in front of the fax machine. She turns and, with great satisfaction, waves a paper toward Gibbs like a victory flag.

Gibbs glances from Michelle to Ziva, considering. He wants to move quickly, hit the bastard before he has a clue they're coming; he'll call Shepherd on the way, but what of his people? Can he trust them to...?

"_Gear up_!"

xxx

In the lowermost depths of NCIS Headquarters, Supervisory Special Agent Kevin Lamb passes through the sliding glass doors into the Autopsy suite to find Ducky and _Doctor _Jimmy Palmer, Deputy Medical Examiner_,_ in consultation, looking over a series of x-ray films backlit by the wall light panel. There's no body laid out on any table and, from the tone of Ducky's voice, he's presiding over a 'pop quiz'.

'Anything to take the mind off this nightmare,' Lamb grants, having left his two partners to deal with this issue alone. He hadn't wanted to go, to leave them alone in their fourth floor office, but while Lisa DuBois deals with the stress of this invasion in typically philosophical fashion, Janet Levy is having a harder time coping.

'What do I _care _if some pimply teen in Oshkosh gets his rocks off in two minutes flat?" Lisa had asked. "He doesn't know me and I'll never know him,' to which Janet retorted:

'What about the people who _do _know you?'

'If it'll improve my date life, great. That gal with the scarlet thong has a pair I'd kill for.'

But Jan had been far more distressed, the woman nearly driving herself to a fit of apoplexy over the argument. When that happened he'd been about to halt the conversation but instead had taken Lisa's signal and departed, leaving the women to themselves. They'll deal with one another and, he hates to admit it, probably better than with him there.

He's left to wonder which of his people will come out of this less scathed, Zen-like Lisa or mercurial Janet. He suspects Janet, with her tendency to vent, will blow off the most steam and he should probably watch Lisa more closely. He's known cases involving the reputedly 'quiet ones' too often, especially during his years with the Kansas City PD, but he'll aid both of them to the best of his ability.

He hopes that'll be by giving the men before him some work to do.

x

"Hey, guys," he calls casually and the pair turn to him.

"Ah, Agent Lamb," Ducky greets him grandly, "empty handed I see."

"Next time I promise to bring candy."

They smile, Palmer's more of a 'boyish grin'. "Any time we can see one of our friends," Ducky continues, "who is _not_ bringing a body to autopsy then it is a good day."

"Day's still young," he assures them. "I'll be glad to bring you down the next one if Gibbs or one of the others doesn't score first."

"Score?" Ducky glances from him to Palmer, mystification etched upon his face. He turns back, seeking enlightenment. "In what sense are you or Agent Gibbs going to 'score'?"

"Oh oh." All of NCIS knows, and he suddenly wishes he'd stayed in some other part of it. "You don't know."

The examiners exchange another look before Ducky tells him "No, but I'm depending on you to enlighten us."

The lightness with which this line is delivered is the final straw. 'They _don't_ know.' "Shit, why'd I have to be the one to tell you?" He gives up railing at fate and addresses Palmer. "I am so sorry."

"For what?"

"I don't want to say it," he confesses and glances toward the open laptop on the small table across the room. "Use your computer?"

"Certainly," Ducky says, looking forward to the end of this minor mystery.

x

Lamb goes to the small table and sits down, calls up the Internet and types in the address of one of the offending sites. Ducky and Palmer come to stand on either side behind him as he types, and Ducky is quite surprised at the address selected.

"Slut box dot com?" Ducky's wonder changes to gentle chiding reminder as the site opens and Lamb clicks on a link, then selects the first of a collection of thumbnail images. "Agent Lamb, we _do _have rules at NCIS and–" Ziva David appears. "Oh my…."

The Mossad Liaison is tastefully attired in her gold badge hanging from a chain around her neck and resting whimsically upon her left breast.

"You said Gibbs was going to score," Palmer quips. "Looks more like Ziva's going to bring us our next corpse."

Lamb collapses the image and selects another from the collection of tiny images. Director Jennifer Shepherd stands before a barn door, wearing only a western hat, and there's a caption about plowing her field, her smile enhancing the offer.

"Agent Lamb," there's no more humor in Ducky's tone, "what is going on?"

Lamb doesn't answer, looks up at Palmer instead. 'Best he learn about it from a friend.' He only wishes he weren't the friend. He collapses Shepherd's photo. "Jimmy, I'm sorry."

"What? Why?"

Michelle appears on the screen, kneeling on a bed, the clasp of her bra open between her breasts, the small garment spread wide. She's sitting back and her legs are spread invitingly….

Jimmy's hand lashes out, slaps the screen so hard the unit slams into the back wall and he grabs the screen and slams the computer shut.

"Mister Palmer," Ducky begins but the face his Deputy turns to him is frightening, a hateful mask of purple rage.

"I'll _kill _them! _Where are they_?"

"I don–" Lamb begins.

Jimmy grasps his shoulders, hauls the amazed man to his feet. "WHERE _ARE _THEY?"

Lamb reacts automatically, his forearms come up to break Palmer's hold but he doesn't strike back at the furious man - Ducky's voice does.

"_Mister _PALMER!"

x

The madness leaves the purple-faced man as immediately as it had consumed him and Lamb takes advantage of the second of confused hesitation to take a large step out of reach. "I don't know where they are but Gibbs does. His team - your wife included - is on their way to confront them. This has happened to _every _woman in NCIS Headquarters. I hear it's against the other Agencies too and Gibbs' team will arrest the ones who did it."

"I - I kn–" Jimmy says, his color gradually fading as he steps back from them, trembling from the unused flood of adrenaline. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean–"

"I'll be sure to tell her how zealously you defended her honor." Lamb's words have an echo of Ducky in them and help to further restore Palmer's equilibrium, but what he thinks is 'We've gotta watch more than just the women.'

He carefully keeps this thought from reaching his face.

xxx

Gibbs stops his car outside the building housing the offices of Paradise Publishing, parent company of, among other publications, 'We' magazine. Not reaching for the door handle, he turns right to the two women, David, perhaps appropriately riding 'shotgun' and Palmer in the back seat squeezed between McGee and DiNozzo. 'Does it really look like they're guarding her, or is that just me?'

"I'm not going to warn you even once."

"There is no need," Ziva assures him, her expression blank and voice empty.

He looks further back; Palmer's eyes are locked on the back of David's head. "No, sir." Her voice is forced between clenched teeth and stressed enough to break and he considers for a moment leaving her behind. There was a time he'd do it as a matter of routine, but if he's going to trust her in stressful situations then she has to be put in stressful situations. He trusts that she's well aware of the price of failing him.

He opens his door and leads them, McGee and an uncommonly quiet DiNozzo to their target.


	7. Trouble in Paradise

Chapter Seven  
Trouble in Paradise

Authoritative bearings and black shield jackets proclaiming 'NCIS Federal Agent' supplemented by equally distinctive white on black caps clear right-of-way through the building lobby. No one, seeing the grim set of their features, attempts to challenge private use of the elevator which brings the five Agents to the 9th floor, that destination revealed upon the lighted wall directory near the ignored Security officers.

When they step onto the carpeted 9th floor corridor they find themselves facing glass doors and wall that provide an excellent view of the round Receptionist well within. Gibbs pushes the door out of his way; his team flanks him before the round countertop surrounding a decorative woman. Brown hair, mid-30's, cream pants suit, she glances up briefly at the five dark visitors but keeps her attention on the telephone receiver at her left ear.

x

"One moment, please," she tells the quintet. "Yes, Mister De Palma, Mister Wellington will be able to see you tomorrow at–"

The unit at her ear goes dead and she glances left, surprised to see that the tall man in the middle of the group has reached over the counter and his finger holds down the phone's button. He's holding in his other hand an ID folder containing a gold shield. "_Hey_!" That was Brian De Pal–"

"Your President," the man says in deadly tones. "Now."

"Just who do you think you–?"

"Your President." The man leans slightly forward, looming over the counter, his eyes like cannons. "Now."

Desire for a long and pain-free life makes her decide there's great wisdom in passing this matter up the chain-of-command. She gestures to the phone and the man removes his finger from the button.

x

Charles Tedesco steps into the outer foyer more in response to Anne Gendelman's tone than her message and finds there are indeed five people at the circular Receptionist station. The oldest of the black uniformed people steps forward to intercept him. "Charles Tedesco. May I help you?" he asks in his most formal 'this is a business' manner.

Each of them display metal and card IDs. "Special Agents Gibbs, DiNozzo, McGee, Palmer, Officer Dav-eed, NCIS."

Confronted with this very official delegation - where in Washington are there not such? - Tedesco is more willing to be sociable. "Yes?"

"You're the President?"

Tedesco knows that's who they'd asked to see. "I'm the Managing Editor."

The leader - Gibbs - seems satisfied. "Is there someplace we can talk?"

He'd rather not, but Federal Agents of any breed are rarely put off, and never for long. "My office."

The man's nod says this is satisfactory and, resigned to the inevitable, Tedesco turns and leads the way.

xx

Gibbs, satisfied he's impressed this manager with the seriousness of his intent, decides he can afford now to tone that seriousness down a notch. By the time they're in a mahogany office somewhat grander than Director Jennifer Shepherd's, Gibbs is ready to move on to phase two.

Tedesco takes his place behind a desk as large as two combined and probably feels pretty secure. "NCIS. Didn't 'We' do a feature on you a few months ago?"

Gibbs knows the man knows all about it. "That's why we're here."

Tedesco reacts more to Gibbs' grim tone than to his answer. "Is there a problem with the article?"

"Someone used both the published and _unpublished _photos of our agents," DiNozzo says, playing his part in the united gang-up, "to create _nude photo fakes_ of women purporting to be our agents and posted them all over the Internet."

They watch the color fall out of Tedesco's face.

x

"N-nude photo fakes?" Tedesco's voice quivers under the weight of lawsuits and worse.

"Of me!" Ziva declares viciously, driving a nail into the coffin of the Corporation's profits.

"And _me_," Michelle pounds another nail in.

"And my _wife_." McGee, with his own nail, adds another dimension to Tedesco's nightmare.

"And every other woman in our agency, all Federal Officers," DiNozzo drives the next nail in.

"We believe the same was done to the women from our sister Federal Agencies; OSI, CID and CGIS." McGee hammers in another nail. On the way to this meeting, though he doesn't know many other corresponding Agents well, he did find a picture purporting to be Hollis Mann and doesn't want to be the one to tell the Lt. Colonel about her grand unveiling.

"And we're here to arrest everyone responsible," Gibbs completes the interment.

Tedesco's hard gulp might be audible in the hallway outside. "May I make a call?"

"You'd better."

xx

Corporate Presidents get the best offices and President of Paradise Publishing Lydia Jackson's overlooks the Capital Mall from a glass eastern wall fourteen stories above.

Seven people sit in that palatial chamber and two of them feel distinctly queasy.

"Special Agent Gibbs - _Special Agents_," now is not the time to fail in political correctness or courtesy "let me say I am very sorry for this."

"You can say it," Gibbs assures Jackson, "as long as you give us the ones responsible."

"I assure you we will make a thorough investigation and..." her voice dies off at Gibbs' headshake.

"Investigation is our job. Your issue 'Women Crime Fighters in the Military' was used to humiliate a lot of Agents and the production and distribution of Internet Pornography is a felony. NCIS found out about it only this morning so we're the first ones here."

"I figure it won't be long at all," DiNozzo says, "before the Army Criminal Investigation Division,"

"Air Force Office of Special Investigations," Ziva puts in.

"And the Coast Guard Investigative Service," Michelle says cuttingly.

"Come beating down your doors," Gibbs concludes, rather liking this cooperative coffin nailing technique as much as the paper-white faces before them.

x

"What," Lydia Jackson asks, reaching with a shaking hand for a glass and the pitcher of ice water, "can we do?" The ice clinks loudly in the sloshing pitcher.

"We'll run interference with the other Agencies, but we expect immediate and complete cooperation in our Investigation." The warrant in his jacket pocket effectively covers this same thing, but it's much better to have motivated cooperation.

"You have it," Jackson assures them, seeing her career and the company's financial stability, possibly the entire corporation's existence, hanging by a very thin thread. She turns to Charles Tedesco. "Who took those pictures?"

"Of NCIS, Aaron Comer. Suzanne Blake went to the Army. I have to check on the others."

"Get Comer and Blake up here now." When he leaves, Jackson prays she and these five Agents can come to an understanding that'll allow her to keep her company in business. The potential law suits alone could be devastating, the public backlash immense. Looking into the hard eyes of Agents David and Palmer, she doesn't have high hopes. "Gentlemen - _Ladies _and gentlemen, couldn't we come to a compromise?"

"Certainly." Gibbs watches Jackson's eyes brighten in hope. "We'll have our male agents make the arrests."

xx

Suzanne Blake is in the field on a 'Photo Shoot' but responded to the summons to return immediately to the office. In the meantime, when a knock comes at the office door Ziva is on her feet immediately, well aware of the disconcerting image she presents as she opens the door, grips the arm of their present chief suspect and escorts him by quick march to her vacated chair, seats him in the midst of an intimidating crowd of superiors and grim investigators and assumes a 'looming gargoyle' post above his left shoulder.

Aaron Comer is 30 years old, hair just short of shoulder-length insufficiently dyed to disguise threaded premature-grey left unattended for a week too long. His belt buckle is silver Texas long horn, his black shirt is covered by an open black vest whose shine catches the light of the glass wall. Though his eyes betray discomfort, presumably at being summoned into the inner sanctum of the Corporation President seated with Executives and black clad Federal Agents, they hold no fear. Gibbs reserves his decision on whether he'll give the man any.

"What's this all about?" Comer asks when introductions have been made.

Gibbs has already recognized that this is the man who'd spent an entire day at NCIS taking a vast number of digital photos. Now he must determine what the man did with them.

"We want to discuss your photos, the ones you took in NCIS Headquarters."

"Is there a problem? I mean, your Public Relations Department went over exactly what we could and couldn't shoot and the Reporter could report. Your PR man was with us the whole time. I assure you we uncovered no secrets."

"'Uncover secrets'," Gibbs says. "That's what we're here to discuss." He glances to the woman behind Comer's shoulder. "Officer Da-veed?" From a folder Ziva withdraws and hands down to the photographer a photo of herself. It was taken at her desk, her partition wall forming the background. "Recognize that?"

"Sure, it's one of mine." Ziva passes over the next picture. All above the neck is the same, the erotic pose on what's supposedly a beach is not. Ziva is quite convincingly making love to a palm tree, stroking her crotch against it and the image is so sharp they can see the puckered flesh of her erect nipples. Her smile is unchanged but in the context...

Michelle pulls two photos out of her own folder and drops them on Comer's lap. The first is the familiar published image and in the other she's leaning back against a window, a very sensuous pose, her blouse hanging open, her hands raised as though she were surrendering or obedient to some command. The image extends to her knees but the open shirt reaches only to her waist.

The Agents watch surprise escalate and quickly give way to sick realization. Comer's eyes and mouth are wide as he falls back into the seat. "Ohhhh ... _shit_."

x

Gibbs, long in favor of the 'sledgehammer between the eyes' method of interrogation, is satisfied by the dozen more subtle and uncontrolled reactions he's seen from the man. "Who has access to your unpublished pictures?"

"U - un - unpub - pub - publi - unpublished?"

"There are nearly a thousand different pictures on the Internet," Gibbs tells him, not about to ease up on the pressure.

"I - I - I - I don - I don't - I don't know." He slaps the image of Ziva paper down, belated outrage forcing the fugue away. "I had nothing to do with this!"

"I know." Gibbs is quite satisfied the man's surprise - and distress - are genuine.

"This could cost me my job!"

"Hell of a lot more than just your job. Who has access?"

"I don't know." Gibbs gives him his most disbelieving expression. "I don't _know_! It's not like these pictures are secure or anything. I turned them all in, someone _else _decides which get used, I go on to my next assignment and I never bother to look back!"

Gibbs glances at Jackson. "It's true," the President assures him. "After we go to press, old pictures stay on disk for months or years at a time, pretty much ignored."

"I think you'll be changing that policy."

x

As the Warrant Gibbs carries in his jacket pocket covers computer as well as physical files, Gibbs decides it's time to turn his Number One Computer Guru loose on the records. "We'd like access to your computers now."

Though he frames the words as a request, the Warrant makes it no such thing. He's holding back on presenting the paper, preferring cooperation, even if it's fearfully obtained, over legal compulsion.

At the moment, Jackson and Tedesco are looking at this long-built empire toppling around their ears, their profit line digging a hole into the street, their stock turning to toilet paper and their assets obliterated by lawsuits, to say nothing about their professional and public reputations being decimated. They're ready to cooperate in any way that'll leave them on their feet in the end.

And Gibbs, as always, is happy to have Rule 13 firmly in place: Never involve a Lawyer.

"Come with me, please." Tedesco's invitation is a hair short of pleading as McGee stands to follow.

"DiNozzo, go with him." Gibbs doesn't have to say aloud that the senior field agent is to interview the IT staff. He's also to keep them occupied so they won't try to be 'helpful' while McGee works.

xx

Led into the IT Department on the 10th floor, DiNozzo and McGee pause behind Tedesco and survey the huge room crammed with computer workstations. "Sherman," DiNozzo mutters, "set the Wayback Machine for the days of quill pens and parchments."

"You'll be doing the talking, Tony. I'll be doing the typing."

"By the way, I meant to ask before," he actually sounds apologetic even to his own ears, "how'd your wife take it when you told her?"

McGee keeps his eyes straight ahead as he walks into the room. "Don't ask."

x

Tedesco is giving his staff a soft introduction to the problem; too soft, Tony decides as he steps up a foot before the man. "Ladies and Gentlemen, pursuant to a Federal Warrant I'm inviting each of you to that wall, yes, that wall there, where I'll be asking a lot of personal, probing questions which you will answer truthfully and in complete detail while my partner here invades your computer and personal systems to uncover your deepest and darkest secrets. So everybody, just line up right over there and get ready to spill your guts."


	8. Common Prayer

Chapter Eight  
Common Prayer

Special Agent Tina Larsen, presently assigned to Handwriting Analysis Division, fights nausea and her cramping stomach as she walks down the fourth floor corridor, trying to sort out her feelings and push the day away. She'd been trying to focus on the documents on her desk, one a confirmed signature, the other a questioned sample on a Loan Application but thinking about the cyberspace nightmare when she felt the force of a thousand pounds figuratively slam into her chest, wrench her stomach and she must fight back her mistake of a lunch.

There are pictures out there, in over a hundred countries, four thousand cities, on every ship in the Navy, in every Marine Base! She was a Special Agent Afloat for 18 months, four ships, over twenty thousand men on those ships know her and how many are looking at pictures of her _right this second_? What filth is being printed? Posted on wardroom bulletin boards? Getting taped up on cabin walls?

An SAA's job isn't to make friends, it's to enforce the law. How many men are jerking off to her _right now_? How many men saw her as 'the unattainable woman' and now have more than fantasy and imagination to thrill them? How many men she's investigated are now exploring her body in how many different obscene, explicit, sickening photos?

Then, as if this wasn't horrendous enough, she'd looked over her shoulder at her coworkers, her partners, and thought 'they're doing it too! While my back's turned... How many of them, how many _Agents_ in Washington, in Florida, in Hawaii, in New York are looking at – are downloading – are _collecting_ porn pictures of me?'

Stomach churning, she'd had to get out. She'd wanted to run. She couldn't stand it in that room for another second; she thought she was going to vomit all over the documents on her desk.

Now she walks blindly down the hall, wants to run, doesn't know where to run to when suddenly she stops dead, wondering in her distress, while walking blindly, if the answer has been given to her, if she were led here without seeing her guide. The door she's beside is only one door out of so many, unremarkable but for the two white lines on the brown shingle posted beside it. 'S. McGee, Chaplain'.

x

She flashes back, remembering so vividly the days a few years ago when, between assignments, she'd been shunted to a vacant desk in SSA Gibbs' bullpen, the desk that Michelle Palmer uses now. It was there she met, and developed an instant detestation for, Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo.

He'd come on to her, she'd said no. He'd come on to her again and she'd reinforced that no. Then he came on to her again and she had to show him the depth of her disinterest by threatening to go to Human Resources if he didn't shut up and leave her alone.

But then, to her vast surprise, the Lothario's partner, Timothy McGee, had stepped in to defend Casanova's honor. In a series of IM exchanges, Tim had tried to assure her of DiNozzo's sterling character, and had gone so far as to ask her to give him another chance, placing his own reputation on the line.

She hadn't taken Tim up on that, but she had been so impressed by his loyalty to a partner, undeserving of that consideration as DiNozzo had been, that she became intrigued by _him_. That attraction had led to an invitation to drinks, and that had led to a real date, and _that_ had led to about a dozen more and the wildest times she'd ever had with a man she worked with – in bed - on the couch - on her living room table - on the stairs to her apartment when neither of them could stand to wait another second….

It had ultimately faded from insane lust into friendship, and they'd both gone on to other people but the friendship never died ….

Now Tim's married and she's staring at a two line white on brown shingle: 'S. McGee' 'Chaplain.'

x

'I can't do this. How can I do this? I – I dated her hus…. But she's hired to help. But she's just back from her _honeymoon_. Today! How can I do this? But she's supposed to hel–'

She crosses to the door, knocks fast, sharply, before she can back away, and stands with her heart pounding, praying the door won't open.

But it does. The redheaded priest is as tall as she is, she's wearing a black skirt, a light blue back-buttoned shirt and a two inch high stiff white collar that encircles her throat. "Yes?" The voice is unassuming, not overwhelming, inviting without being compelling….

"I – tha tis – _that is_ I–"

"Come in."

x

When Tina steps in, twin surprises stop her. "Sorry about the …" the priest gropes for a word, "mess."

"'Mess' doesn't quite cover it," Tina denies, slightly stunned. It's like walking into a Hallmark warehouse – after it exploded.

"Abby Sciuto started decorating, and only stopped because, after a fortnight, she ran out of time."

"Say no more." Actually, Tina doesn't mind hearing it. It serves as an effective distraction, for it means that some problems aren't the overwhelming assault they've had to deal with. In fact, after a moment, she rather enjoys the sense-stunning display.

x

But the second surprise isn't as pleasant as the first, for she'd thought to have a moment alone with the priest and there are two women already seated on the couch to her right. At least it _is_ a couch, but it seems it could as easily be a Reviewing Stand for the Tournament of Roses Parade. She recognizes the women instantly, of course; Intel Analyst Nikki Jardine and Susan Brady from Polygraph. "I should come back."

"No," the priest says, almost an appeal for ... what? "I'm very sorry. Normally I won't see more than one person, but I suspect we're all here for the same reason - and later I may not have as few as three."

"Please stay," Brady says, recognizing a fellow needful soul.

"No, this is a mistake. I shouldn't have come. I don't – that is I don't think I…."

"I won't stop you, if you want to leave," McGee says, "but I think it would help you to stay. And honestly, I'm not sure I can keep things down to four when it starts to really get bad."

Tina can't blame her. The woman's – thank God it _is_ a woman, most everyplace else has men – her job, her Calling, requires her to make herself available to all who need her, but she's one woman and this disaster - this abuse is…. The priest's choices are to stay here 24 hours a day, turn people away or double, triple … _quadruple_ up. But still….

"I can't. I – I'm – I – I've made a mistake. I shouldn't be here." Things are horrible enough, but she's just _met_ this woman, how can she…?

"Are you really sure?"

'_I fucked your husband_!' She can't say it – _ever_ – and can't keep it from screaming in her head. Can the woman hear it?

x

"Please, give yourself a chance. We can help one another, learn to help one another deal with this."

"This is a mistake. I shouldn't be here. I– I..." '_I fucked your husband_, maybe as often as you have. _More_?' "I'm Lutheran."

Susan Brady shrugs. "Methodist."

Nikki Jardine smiles. "Roman Catholic."

Siobhan brings her Executive chair out from her desk, rotates it to face her guests as Tina, out of excuses, sits down with the other women on the couch ... and no one says anything.

x

"You started to ask me something," Siobhan prompts Nikki Jardine after several moments. The woman sits stiffly between Susan and the end of the couch, trying not to touch anything, nor to allow anything - or anyone - to touch her.

"It's not important." Her expression, her entire body, belies the claim.

"Nonsense. We're all here for support, to mutually deal with this. I'd like you to feel comfortable."

"I don't want to insult you."

Siobhan only allows a little bit of the smile to show. "Then you won't." She believes she knows the root of the tense woman's discomfort; it'd been painted all over her body from the moment the door had opened, and it seems to her that she's dealt with the same problem thousands of times already.

Jardine doesn't disappoint her. With as much reluctance as she displays when touching any unscrubbed and unsanitized surface, she says "I'm not even sure how to ... that is, it's just that ... well, you see, I was brought up ... I mean, a Priest is..."

Siobhan recognizes the slight woman has taken it as far as she can, and she hasn't disappointed her. "A man."

"I don't mean it that way I mean I know you're Ordained and all but I was well I was brought up that there was only one true religion one path to Salvation that women if they wanted could be Nuns but not..."

x

Siobhan lets the quiet linger, waiting for the woman to catch her breath but after that one rush Nikki seems unable to say more. She's shot the whole wad. "I get that all the time," she assures them, trying to convey, with voice and body, that she doesn't feel slighted.

"You do?"

Siobhan does her best not to laugh. If Jardine weren't so overstressed by nude pictures of herself shooting all over the world, she'd never have said that. But how to put her at ease?

"It's particularly common in hospitals; you have to register as 'Roman Catholic', 'Protestant' or 'Other'. I not protesting anything and Other seems so ... other."

"What do you do?" Susan Brady asks.

She smiles, as though revealing a private joke. "I check all three and let them find rules to figure it out. The Pastoral Care offices are better informed anyway so I get _their _lists. But sometimes still 'never the twain shall meet'." 'And none of this is anything but avoiding the issue we're all here for. Still, I have to establish some common ground.'

"When I was _young_," she tells her new friends, well, Susan's not new, "I was a girly-girl. My hobby was collecting Barbie dolls. I had every version ever made 'till then. I'd have them lined up on my mantle, on shelves, everywhere in my bedroom. I used to inflict them on my husband Tim - we were just dating way back then- something terrible." She turns to Tina Larsen. "Do you know my husband?"

x

Tina chokes, feels her heart try to leap out of her chest and flee. "I * that is * is * I've met * met him." '_I've fucked him_!'

"Are you all right?"

'Oh God she _knows_! Does she know? She knows! Oh _shit_!' "I * I'm * I'm all * all right." But she isn't sure she can keep the fear from her eyes, yet the Priest doesn't follow through; doesn't smite her, doesn't call her a–.

"Anyhow, I used to inflict my hobby upon my boyfriend something terrible; I suspect he either rather enjoyed it or he was too nice to say otherwise. Either way, he spent a lot of time around Barbie dolls. But the point is the four of us aren't at all different. Don't think about this collar. Just think of shelves full of Barbies."

"No," Susan Brady says with heat. "We're _not_ different. We're all _humiliated_. I even saw a picture of–" She can't say it, amazed she'd even started to.

"Spare me, please." Siobhan flashes back, and tries her best to keep the memory from her face, to the pictures from her distant past, the ones that _weren't _faked. 'Best to never think of them, even if I can't ever _forget_.'

"The thing is," Susan continues, allowing Siobhan a secret moment to shove that guilt back into the steel box in her mind, "I was feeling good about that 'We' article until this happened. Now I can't even look anyone in the eye - thinking they saw those pictures."

"I think people have been _collecting _them," Nikki Jardine declares, her words sparking new depths of fear in her companions. If they haven't faced the prospect before, they can't escape it now that it's said.

"I don't want to think about that!" Tina Larsen insists.

"I can't _stop_ thinking about it." Jardine exclaims. "The Agents who're tracing these things–"

"_Deserve our trust that they'll respect us_," Siobhan declares forcefully, not willing to allow any mistrust to take hold. The 'Adversary' would use that as his greatest weapon.

"How _can_ we trust them?" Tina appeals.

"They're _men_!" Susan declares.

"Then trust in God. He has your back. He loves you as a daughter and will take care of you. Even before you ask He'll give you the strength to get through this, and the confidence to trust our _friends _and our colleagues to act honorably toward us."

"I wish I could," Tina says, her tone longing but guarded.

"It's driving me crazy!" Nikki cries. "I can't look at them."

"I can't work with them," Susan exclaims, thinking about that Agent she'd passed in the hallway coming here, the way his eyes lingered on her chest and she was too ashamed to confront him.

"I have three men in my office!" Tina cries. "How do I know that when my back is turned, when I can't see their screens that they're not–?"

Siobhan stands and holds out her hands invitingly.

x

Susan and Nikki, after several seconds, stand up and take her hands. For Nikki to actually touch any of them says to Tina and Susan more clearly than words what forces drive her and Tina can't do anything but join them. The priest brings all their hands together and eight hands clasp as they will.

"Father, we come to you in need, in pain, in fear and anguish - and we ask you in your mercy to take all of it away. You have promised 'Come unto me all you who travail and are heavy laden and I will give you peace.' Take _our_ yokes from us and pour out your peace in abundance. We, your daughters, come to you _trusting_ that you will do this, that you will free us from our pain and our fear and our distrust and will stand with us in our trials; that you will send your Angels to stand watch over us and protect us against the devices of the evil one. You have promised that where two or more gather before you that you will be with us; that you will lift us up, free us from pain and fear. Teach us how to fight this assault, and send your heavenly Angels to stand beside us and protect us. This we ask that you do now, trusting in your merciful–"

She's quite surprised as Susan Brady suddenly breaks the grip and throws her arms about her, and an instant later Tina Larsen – and even Nikki Jardine – join in the huge embrace and Siobhan knows she's said quite enough.

xxx

Gibbs, David and Palmer, having completed probing interviews with Aaron Comer and his associates Suzanne Blake, Harry Shaster and Deborah Norwich, who had been assigned to the Army, Air Force and Coast Guard respectively, meet DiNozzo and McGee for the coordinated rendezvous in the lobby minutes before the anticipated five o'clock stampede.

"I see you've got no one in bracelets," DiNozzo observes.

"Investigation's still young," Gibbs assures him. "What did you find?"

"Pretty much what you'd expect. The level of security for access to soft Intel like old unused photographs is that you pretty much have to be employed."

"Anyone confess?" Gibbs knows he won't be amazed this afternoon.

"They seemed pretty clueless that anything was going on. Tedesco sat in on the interviews while one of his flunkies kept everyone else quiet but he was putting on his own pressure so I barely had to use the thumbscrews. He's focused on C.H.A."

"Yeah, everybody will cover his ass, especially when money's at stake," Gibbs agrees, disgusted.

"The servers indicate the files were accessed irregularly," McGee says. "Often prior to publication, less so in the days just before hitting the presses, then a sharp falloff to nothing after the magazine hit the stands."

"Who accessed them?"

"I compared Employee IDs: Art Department, Layout, PR, Advertizing, all you'd expect in producing and marketing a monthly publication."

"And nothing since?"

"No."

"What does that tell you, McGee?"

x

The answer has been obvious for hours. "Whoever did it could copy the files at any time onto a flash drive or CD and stroll out, and if they did it, it was before the issue hit the stands. They could even just forward the files anywhere they wanted. This would give the Fakers plenty of lead time. They started their postings long enough after the magazines hit the stands for people to develop an interest, then they filled it. Our protocols would detect any later downloads, these aren't as sophisticated, not when it comes to public access stuff."

"Public access?"

"The stuff is published; no one cares about the files after they've gone to press."

"Bet you wish you could give an entire company head slaps," DiNozzo says, no humor in his tone.

Gibbs leads the way out of the lobby. "I'd use the shillelagh."


	9. Fallout

Chapter Nine  
Fallout

Gibbs walks into the Forensics Lab and immediately cringes, blasted by Abby's white radio inches from his right ear. Wincing at the cacophonous assault, he turns and reaches for the radio but surprise halts him. Resting on the wall and supported by the radio is a huge white poster board which declares in large red letters trailing blood 'TOUCH THIS AND DIE!'

Abby is seated at her freestanding workstation, staring intently at the computer monitor that displays lines of computer code he doesn't even try to interpret. With anyone else, and at any other time, he'd simply pull the offending machine's plug and batter down protests. Instead, he steps beside the workstation into her eyesight and, the distance from the unit not helping, gestures to her in a complex ballet of hand motions.

She gets off the stool, crosses the room, removes the sign and lowers the volume to one-twentieth its fatal setting. "Gibbs, do not talk to me unless you're bringing me a body to autopsy."

"Ducky does the autopsies."

"Ducky is a _gentleman, _unlike these bastards. He'll share."

x

He doesn't want to think about that. "How can you think with that racket?" He's asked her that several times over the years, but has yet to receive a comprehensible answer. He doesn't hold out hope this time either.

"Don't want to think, want to do. If I block out everything but work I won't be able to feel anything about things like _this_." She restores from a minimized screen an image of herself dressed in an inviting smile, standing before a bed, her hands reaching low to her shaved vulva, her fingertips spreading...

Gibbs turns off the monitor.

"I wish it were that easy," Abby declares hotly.

"What can make the hunt easier?"

"Evidence storage has a load of artillery, some of it unregistered, awaiting trial on several cases." She doesn't wither under his glare, knowing he knows her well enough. She decides to let up on the hyperbole; he's always on her side. "All right. Fakes of our people have appeared on over twenty websites, going back about a month. The ISP addresses are routed from all over the planet, some of the images are simply reposts. Several of the originals are from temporary IPs created on public sites; the system generates a random number, deletes it when you log off, useless garbage. The bastards are probably using a flash drive to upload the images, but using so many ISPs it's making the original source a nightmare to pinpoint. There's so much inter-sharing and reposting that I can't give you a first source, 'cause there's no guarantee the first one who posted to a site is the first one who created the pictures."

x

"What do you need?"

"Time to establish a trace to every website in existence that's posted them, including private blogs."

"Difficult?"

"Normally no, but fakers have their own sharing system, if you can call it that. They download and repost at will, most times without ever asking, sometimes without even acknowledging the source."

"We know they came from 'We' magazine."

"So I heard. You didn't see me upstairs on the balcony but I saw you. Tell Tony he looks cute when he thinks he's going to get torn limb from limb."

"I'll be sure to let him know. Did throw a scare into him."

"Won't change him a bit."

"I know."

x

The banter, for what little half-hearted effort they could raise, falls away. "How are your people holding up?" He hadn't had more than the barest summary of the meeting in MTAC.

"My people," she scoffs. "I have people. Well, Gibbs, my _people _are pissed and out for blood. We're violated, invaded, _raped _and looking for justice, preferably through some of that unregistered artillery I mentioned. _I _have an out; in the pictures taken of me for 'We' my hair was down and blocked most of this," she touches the spider web tattoo at the left side of her neck, "so though I have sixteen tats the pictures those _bastards _are showing show none."

Only for a moment do her feelings slip through, but in a consistently happy person like Abby that slip is significant.

He takes a step forward, his arms open, a gesture he'd offer no other person but, to his surprise, she holds up her hands. "Keep away from me, Gibbs! I don't even feel like hugging _you_, if you can believe that. I don't trust myself. I might get it in my head you're having too good a time and I won't be responsible for what happens."

"You won't do that," he assures her.

"I know. It was hyperbole. But I'm scared."

x

"Scared?" He's seen her scared, this isn't it. This is mad and vengeful.

"Not for me, I have artistic deniability, but sometime - soon - someone who knows one of 'my people' is going to find those pictures, and then what? McGee found them by accident... or so I heard," she finishes with uncharacteristic suspicion.

"He did."

"After a month of them being up. But what about if a husband or parents or a neighbor or...?"

Gibbs has had the same fear. Every minute that more and more of these random creations circulate around the planet, the inevitable grows closer. "We'll find them, Abs. We'll stop them. I swear it."

Despite her earlier words, she rushes to him, throws her arms about him and clings tightly. Her lips by his ear, her voice is tiny and lost, having none of the élan or self assurance that characterizes Abby Sciuto. Her body trembles with the effort to hold her emotions. "Save us, Gibbs."

xxx

In the fourth floor office Supervisory Special Agent Kevin Lamb shares with his team mates Janet Levy and Lisa DuBois, the mood is grim and, save for the soft clicking of computer keys, the quiet is heavy and smothering.

"All right," Lamb says from his place near the door, glancing first at the clock on his desk, then to the two women at facing desks at each corner to his right, "wrap it up." It's already an hour after nominal quitting time. He'd said this an hour ago but, tense from the hunt, both women had volunteered to stay; but Beta shift is in place and well briefed and the past hour has been more stress than progress.

"Don't want to," Janet says flatly, not looking away from her monitor.

Lisa, already starting to close down her system, looks across to her partner, then left to her boss. Neither woman is a clock-watcher, but they've had enough stress for a decade, and when the boss ends the day with his usual order - for a _second _time - he's never been met with flat refusal.

"What've you got?" Lamb asks, leaving his desk to join his partner. Janet has a website open, he doesn't need to ask which of the score of identified sites it is.

"I'm _trying _to track 'Faker Zero'," she tells him. It's the same thing she'd said earlier, but then with less emphasis. There's more than emphasis under her words.

x

Rather than one of the dozens of pseudonyms that proliferate on the web, 'Faker Zero', the target of several teams, is the one who posted the first manipulated image on the Internet.

Unfortunately, while a few sites date their image postings, the majority do not, necessitating hacking into them, but that's simply not an option. The Legal Department is working on getting warrants for the files, otherwise prosecution would be a waste of effort, but to this point Legal's efforts have been unimpressive.

"Any progress?" Lamb knows very well she'd've said so, quite emphatically, if she'd made any. This is his way of emphasizing, still somewhat mildly, 'go home'.

"I found _three _'Faker Zeros', files uploaded on the 6th, so you know what that's worth."

"Then pick it up tomorrow."

"You go." She keeps typing. "Please." He doesn't answer. She looks up. "Plausible deniability."

He lays his hand across hers, stilling her fingers. He doesn't have to say 'you know better'; his eyes say it.

"Come on, Jan," Lisa urges, "let's get a drink." She throws her jacket over her arm. "Better yet, let's get roaring drunk."

Janet looks up at her partner, fire slipping through the cracks. "How can you _stand _that this bastard's done this and is getting–?"

"Good _night_, Jan," Kevin says.

x

Defeated, Levy sighs heavily, gets up and reaches for her jacket hanging from the stand behind her, pulls it on as the telephone rings and Lisa picks it up at her own desk. Janet turns to her Supervisor, unsure what to say. He doesn't hint that she has to say anything at all.

"Jan," Lisa says, "it's your mom."

Levy turns from her boss, relieved and happy to have one bright speck to the day as she picks up her phone and presses the flashing button even as Lisa starts for the door.

"Hi, mom, how's everything? What? Wait, calm down." Lisa and Kevin both turn back. "_No_! What do you–? Wait. No! I di– What do you _mean_ he–? He can't _do _that! All right, _they _can't– Calm _down_! I didn'– Will you stop and let me talk? _No_! That's ridic–! Mom! They can't do that! Because it's wr– Yes, I _know _that bu– Stop it, let me ex– Mom? No, don't you dare hang up! No! I– Mom? _Mom_? DAMN IT!" she throws the receiver at the desk. "I have to go!"

Ducking around them, she runs for the door. DuBois hurries after her but stops at the open door, watches her partner sprint for the elevator and looks back to her team leader.

Neither of them have any guesses.

xxx

Jennifer Shepherd puts the receiver down upon the telephone with exaggerated care, exaggerated because she wants to release a burst of rage upon the inoffensive rectangle of plastic, metal and wire. Conversations with the Directors of the Army CID and Air Force OSI have revealed the unsurprising fact that they were unaware of the electronic assault being waged against the women within their own agencies.

Once she revealed the attack to be more general than either of her colleagues then wished to believe, she'd received _assurances _from the two men that Investigations would be undertaken but it took considerably more effort for Shepherd to press that it be a coordinated effort. After too much talking it was decided, in turn, that the CID and OSI would coordinate under NCIS' lead, as the Navy's investigation has a day's head start. It was further decided, to Shepherd's relief and greater satisfaction of accomplishment that said Investigations would be conducted under a news blackout.

About 25 minutes ago Cyber Crime informed her that the number of 'hits' on the agents have been moderate for the material involved, and confirmed her belief that publicity can only serve to attract attention to the sites and cause much greater harm.

Apprehending those responsible is the highest priority, and in that effort each Agency will send one Liaison Agent to work with NCIS, which has the lead because their Investigation is already a day underway. Lt. Col. Hollis Mann from the Army and Lt. Genevieve Howland from the Air Force will arrive at the Navy Yard in the morning.

She'll assign Mann to Gibbs' team, they've worked well together, and Howland to Melanie Kelman's team; same reason. She doesn't want any one team so overstaffed that they can't function, and if she can get someone from the Coast Guard Investigative Service, that agent can be tied to either Higgins' or Lamb's team. Best to have everyone working the Alpha 0800 - 1600 shift.

She picks up the phone receiver, reaches to punch in the code for Juliana Ryan, Director of CGIS, certain at least that convincing her and garnering cooperation will take far less time than either of the previous calls.

xxx

Tim McGee had sat beside his silent bride during the long trip north, back to their apartment in Silver Spring. She'd sat unmoving, her head back against the headrest, eyes closed and he hadn't disturbed her. They'd entered the apartment building, ridden the elevator upstairs, and the silence had smothered them. He wonders for the fiftieth time what to say when every question that comes to mind, every sentence he can find, sounds utterly stupid and will probably sound worse to her.

He's angry for both her and himself and has trouble separating the two angers. Today, tonight, should be shared in bliss. They're married, they're home, today should be one unending celebration and this _bastard_ has _ruined _it!

And he can't even give vent to his own outrage. She's had a worse day. He turns back to her; she's locked the door but doesn't move from it. "Shav?"

She looks to him and he can see the exhaustion in her blinking eyes. That's one way he's long ago learned to read her; when she's especially tired she blinks more rapidly than usual, completely unaware she's doing it. "Shav, please say something."

"I don't know what to say," she admits dismally, her voice a thousand miles distant.

"How did it…? What did …?"

x

She knows he's hunting for something that'll sound sensitive enough. Normally that's no problem, but today nothing on Earth can be enough. "I talked. We talked. I had as many as four in the office at a time – I never do more than one, or two if I'm counseling a couple, but if I tried that I'd never come home. It's just … too big."

"And who counseled you?"

She shakes her head.

"Come here."

She shakes her head.

x

After a long time, he asks "Do you want me to make dinner?"

She sighs. "I'm not hungry." She leans tiredly against the door. "I'd probably vomit anything I try to eat."

"I'm so sorry I couldn't be with you." She shakes her head; again the denial of his comforting. They're just back from their Honeymoon, they should be inseparable with anything short of a crowbar. "How do you feel?"

She looks down, unable to keep his eyes, depression seemingly making it too hard to hold her head up. Her red hair curtains her face; annoyed, she brushes it away and looks back up, hooking her hair behind her ears so she can see him. The stiff, two inch high white collar encircling her neck has pressed a curved line across her throat.

She doesn't have the strength to force the depression from her face. The day feels so heavy. "I don't _know_ how I feel, a chuisle. I can't even sort it out. This isn't..." she sighs miserably. "This isn't like I'd pictured my first day of wedded bliss in my new home."

"How did you picture it?" She locks eyes with him, surprised. "How did you picture it?" he asks again, unwilling to let her slip away from the question.

x

She forces a smile at the memory, the image, the plans now long gone and impossible to recover. "I'd be here already when you got home; Jethro always makes you work late. I'd have dinner ready, inch thick beefsteak smothered in mushrooms and butter, corn & carrots, exactly the way you like it. I'd have just slippers and an apron on, and we'd put the phone in the closet. I'd serve you dinner, sitting on your lap; I'd have to serve you because your hands would be too busy..." She looks down from his eyes, the barely attained joy vanishes. "And now that ... that ... _person _has ruined everything."

"Then cry, scream, hit something, throw a tantrum, break something. Get it out."

Her half-smile is so obviously forced. "I don't want to throw a fit, Timmy; I want to pray for some way to deal with this.

"Is it working?"

She looks away. "Of course it is." She shakes her head, even sadder, knowing she's wasted the words; when she couldn't keep his eyes she'd as well as said aloud 'I'm lying'. She can't keep the truth out of her voice; her brogue has been thickening by the moment despite her best efforts as the emotion she'd hide wells up in her, batters at her and she won't let any of it out. "No."

He steps to her, embraces her, but it's a few seconds before she can reach for him. "I spoke to a lot of women today," she says into his shoulder. She'd already told him. "But it was more psychology and Liturgical advice and plain listening than anything else. There were so many who needed to talk that we seemed to get lost. After a while I was getting lost, it was hard to remember what I'd said to whom. Things started to blend and I couldn't keep them straight. I tried to get them to find some way to help each other, to knit together, because I – I'm one person... and I'm…."

Emotion has battered her so much she doesn't dare say another word.

x

"You're hurting as much as they are," he tells her, feeling no need to say it other than that it'll get her talking. She nods so sharply her chin stabs into his chest. "Tell me." She shakes her head, again the refusal. "Didn't you tell me that mercy–?"

She clutches his shirt in her fists and for the first time the anger reaches her voice. "I don't _want _to be kind or merciful or understanding! I want to _hurt _those men the way they're hurting me!"

She rips away from him, retreats back to the door, blocked from going further, blocked from escaping, appalled by what she'd just done, by what had just come out of her mouth.

"We will," he swears. If he keeps no other promise to her for the rest of his life, he'll keep this one.

x

"But that's not the real me," she tells the door. "I'm supposed to be above that if I'm going to bring others above–"

"You're not above that."

She whirls back on him, shocked, but then she calms, smiles though her smile is forced. "Timmy, I know what you're trying to do but it won't work. Jenny told me the tale of the boxing ring." His face goes blank. "Oh, that's right, 'Special Agent Gibbs' doesn't talk. He got Jenny in the ring downstairs one day and got her mad enough to work her anger out on him. But I'm not a fighter."

"Well, we could try what Michelle and Jimmy do when they're having a hard time."

"What?"

"They have sex." She laughs, probably her first laugh in hours, shaking her head in wonder. "Or so I've heard."

"Heard from who?" she asks archly. She suspects Michelle and Timmy talk about more when in that bullpen, and almost certainly alone, than cases.

"Priest on one side of me, Witch on the other, Deputy Medical Examiner on the third; I'm taking the Fifth."

x

But she can't keep the mood up, false though it was. "I… honestly don't know what to say anymore. I'm talked out."

"How did it start?"

She sighs, misery almost drowning her, strangling her voice until her brogue becomes so thick even he begins to have trouble understanding her. "About how you'd expect. I walked down the hall shortly after you left, after the meeting in MTAC ended, asked the first woman I saw how she was holding up and I've been at it ever _since_."

He figures that's why she'd been so silent, needing time to unwind from the tension. "I guess you had to deal with a lot of tears."

He's not sure what's in the look she gives him.

x

"No tears," she tells him definitely. "We're humiliated, embarrassed, angry; but for a woman to be driven to tears she'd have to feel frustrated and helpless and your women are _not_ helpless. I dealt with Field Agents, Computer Experts, Analysts, various Forensic specialists, even a Special Agent Afloat who'd just rotated from the Roosevelt yesterday; Agents of all kinds and they are not helpless. They're using their skills to track down these… people… and they're doing it with a vengeance. Anyone whose skills won't help – document analysts, handwriting and fingerprint and so forth – are pitching in where they can with that vengeance, so their 'sisters' can concentrate on what's really important: solving this."

"And what about you?" he asks this as kindly as he can.

She shakes her head. "You'll get no tears out of me. I'm humiliated, but I'm not going to cry ov–"

x

It takes a long moment for her to regain her voice. He gives her that time, reading the torment in her face. But it's a point of pride with Shav; with all she's endured: Morley, Samson, Whitney, she doesn't cry. Not in public. And much as he hates to admit it, he qualifies as public.

"I called George..."

McGee knows Donaldson, Rector of Saint Mary's, well enough to know the man won't push.

"I called him to tell him what happened, why I'm taking an extension on my Leave but I told him it's because I'm so badly needed here, not that I'm too ashamed to show my face at Saint Mary's, wondering if the next person I see has seen those…." She turns away from him.

"Shav–"

"_NO_!" she whirls, but she fights the blast of anger down, remembering who she's snapped at. "No... Like I said, for a woman to be reduced to tears she'd have to feel helpless against what these… people… are doing and… your agents aren't helpless. If anything, they're frustrated because the law is slow and is getting slower, but they're not helpless."

He's not sure what to say. He'd been concerned about her, now his partners, but she knows it and still won't let him in - or rather, herself out.

x

She takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. "Timmy, I really only want to lie down. I've talked myself out today. I'll fix something later."

"You want me to make dinner?"

She shakes her head. "I'm depressed, not suicidal." She sighs; but her smile is forced and the joke didn't help at all. "No, hon, I'm not... I just want to be alone. I haven't been alone all day."

"I know." He lets her pass; she crosses the living / writing room into the bedroom and closes the door.

x

Alone, finally alone, Siobhan goes to her dresser, a recent addition to Timmy's almost Spartan bedroom, and reaches back under her red hair, detaches the clip that holds the two inch high stiff white collar about her throat and sets it upon the dresser. She's exhausted, emotionally more than physically, so exhausted she doesn't even want to undress yet, but to lay down with the stiff circle is to ruin it.

Laying down on the bed, she turns on her side, grasps Tim's pillow and pulls it close, pulls it tight to her face to muffle her sobs.

xxx

Jimmy Palmer watches his wife closely as he closes and locks their apartment door. She stands, stiff with anger, in the center of their living room and though her back is to him he doesn't have to be psychic to feel the anger that fills her to bursting. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"I'm _done _talking." She turns on him, anger drowned in hot rage that's been simmering all through the drive to Georgetown. "Talking doesn't do anything. I'm going to do something _about _this."

"You've been doing something about it all day."

"No I _haven't_! I've been talking and researching and letting Special Agent Gibbs do the interrogating. You men shouldn't be doing this, _we _should. We're the ones who've been violated, and talking and researching and trailing doesn't do a damn thing! Do you know what Special Agent Gibbs had me do just before we left?"

"No," he admits very carefully.

"He had me getting warrants for the photographers' bank accounts, to see who's gotten rich in the past month."

"Well, isn't that a regular first–?"

"_Special Agent Gibbs doesn't do warrants_! He goes in and busts heads and _maybe_, when it's all over, if he _thinks_ of it, he'll send me back to do the paperwork!"

"Well, this is so big, you know, so many victims, so many Agencies, maybe he can't, you know, go in and bust heads? They're going to go by the book."

"If we go by the book these damned _bastards _are never going to pay because their damned abuse is protected by the damned _Constitution_!" She sees in his eyes he wasn't ready for this. "Fakes are _legal _if you include a disclaimer saying they're fake and 'don't depict the real person'."

This is outrageous. "Then what can you do?" When she doesn't answer he reaches out to her, wishing he could think of something real he could do.

"I _know_ what I can do," she declares, "and I'm going to do it!" She shoves off from him and marches resolutely into the bedroom.

x

When he follows down the hall, she's pulling her Wiccan supplies out of the cabinet she uses for an Altar and setting the box onto the bed so she can wrestle the cabinet into the center of the room.

"'Chelle," he says carefully, "what are you doing?" He knows what she's doing; he hopes to get her to think about it.

"You can't be any part of this, honey." She flaps open and spreads on the dresser top a black velvet cloth inscribed with a silver five pointed star within a circle.

This angry determination is a side of her he's never seen and it frightens him. Again he tries to get her to see what she's doing. "Part of what?"

She's not hearing him. She bangs glass-enclosed candles upon the altar and returns to the box. "I'm going to bind that bastard."

"What bastard?"

"_The bastard that's doing this to us_!"

"But you don't even know who he is."

"I don't _have _to know," she declares, slamming a bowl she normally treats with great reverence onto the altar. "His evil intent will bind him."

"'Chelle, what are you going to bind?" he asks even more cautiously. He's occasionally seen her make her preparations for a Wiccan ceremony, though he's never participated - but he's never seen her do it while she's angry.

"I was considering his sex life. A little erectile dysfunction beyond Viagra's ability to help sounds about right."

"'Chelle..."

x

She carries the incense and brassier from the box and sets it within the silver star. "Go away, honey, this doesn't concern you."

It sounds very much like it concerns him. "Didn't you tell me this is _illegal_? Something about the Power of Three?"

She sets down her wand, but this finally grasps her attention and she looks up at him. "_Huh_?"

"Something about whatever you do comes back on you three times?"

"That's the '_Rule _of Three' and I'll risk it."

"I really don't think you should."

"Jimmy, right now I really don't _care_ what you think!" She sees the effect of this slap. "I mean I care, I love you, I adore you but this is none of your business. Now I have to concentrate so I really need you to leave."

He steps to the altar and picks up her wand.

"Put that back!" she snaps, surprised and then outraged that he'd even touch it, let alone try to remove it.

"No. Not until you come to your senses."

x

She slaps her hand down upon the altar, outrage consumed by flaring fury. "We have a deal, _remember_? I leave your medical stuff alone and you leave my magical equipment alone." She reaches for the wooden wand; he holds it high over his head. Between his being nearly a foot taller and his longer arms she doesn't have a chance, but this only makes her angrier. It's intolerable, first those bastards violate her and _now_–

"I'm not playing with you, _James_," she grates between clenched teeth, incandescent eyes searing his. "You do not _touch _my things. _No one_ is to touch a Witch's equipment. Now give it _back_."

"No."

She tries for a reasonable tone, but looking up at him and her wand held high overhead, it lasts half a second. "I am really getting _pissed _with you, _James_. Give me my wand and get _out _of here!"

He backs out of her reach. "Or what? What will you do?"

She thrusts out her open hand. "I said 'GIVE IT _BACK_!"

x

He's slammed away from her, drops the wand as he crashes into the wall, a look of horrified astonishment on his face. She's as surprised; she hadn't directed any power - intentionally.

He clutches his chest, astonishment washed away by agony as she hurries to him, tries to help, but he convulses, intense pain contorting his face. He's so much larger than she is that she can't keep him upright as he falls past her, crashes to the floor with a guttural scream.

"JIMMY!"

x

He convulses on the floor, clutching his chest, his agonized cries terrifyingly loud. She falls to her knees, terrified, not knowing what's wrong. "Jimmy, I'm sorry! I–" He screams in horrendous torment.

"OH GODDESS, NO!" she cries, appealing toward heaven. "I DIDN'T _MEAN_ IT! GODDESS, NO! _HELP_ HIM! PLEASE _HELP_ HIM! I'M _SORRY_!"

She puts her hands upon his chest; Healing has always been her specialty but she doesn't know what's wrong and is too terrified to think. She can't direct anything, can't even see through tears of panic and Jimmy gives one long, soul-searing scream and collapses, utterly still, eyes wide, his face slack, a mask of death.

"_NOOOOOO_!" Michelle shrieks, gathers his limp body into her arms. He's not breathing, motionless as death. Eyes stinging with tears, she snatches at the cell phone at her belt.

x

"And this is how you feel when you _didn't _intend to hurt someone," Jimmy says, picking his head up and smiling at her.

"I – you - you - _Bastard_!"

"Am not. But you needed the kind of lesson a spanking isn't going to teach."

She leaps to her feet, he falling to the floor; her emotions short circuited by outrage and panic and relief and joy and anger and he's looking up at her serenely while she's battered by madness.

x

But then, as they stare into one another's eyes, not speaking, her heart and gasps slow and anger and distress fade with by the realization - and reluctant admission - that he's right. She'd been willing to abandon her discipline and her dedication to the Right Hand Path, to use what she knows and what she can do to hurt, to get _revenge_. She'd been willing to violate the First Law, and to risk the consequences, ignoring - or not letting herself think - that sometimes the consequences of hurting someone guilty can hurt others as well.

It takes many long moments for her to recover, to wipe away tears of relief and grief and joy - and the urge to kick him.

"I won't thank you for that," she declares, dropping to her knees over him. "I know what you tried to do - I love you - but you're still a bastard."

He grins up at her. "You're welcome."

xxx

Ziva kicks the heavy punching bag as hard as she can, feeling the impact jar her leg and spine, all the way to her shoulders. It is an inefficient kick; she normally gets more power and doesn't feel the impact but she wants to feel it. She wants to experience every kick and punch as she attacks the heavy target with savage brutality, releasing all of her hatred and fury. She gets ready for another devastating assault on

"_TONY_!" He is standing right in front of the bag, in front of her foot and she barely pulls the low kick back in time to allow the possibility of an Anthony the Third.

It is only then that she fully appreciates the image he presents. He is wearing a full set of hockey goalie protective equipment, even to the mask.

"Boards ... don't hit back," he says in curiously accented tones.

"It is not a board, it is a bag, and you look like the Michelin Man."

"Bruce Lee to Bob Wall, 'Enter the Dragon', 1973, directed by Robert Clouse–"

"I do not _care_, Tony! Go find yourself a hockey puck."

His eyes scan every inch of her, down and up through the gym clothes plastered to her body. "I thought I just did."

She cannot believe his arrogance. "What did you say to me?"

"What, not only are you losing your edge but your hearing? That last kick was _pathetic_. You can't take on a real man in your condition."

"You show me a real man and we will see. Until then, go away and leave me alone."

He reaches out and squeezes her left breast. Astounded, she batters his hand away. "_DiNozzo_!"

"What, never heard of a sports bra?"

"You do that again and I shall–" He reaches for her right breast and is immediately airborne.


	10. Cherem

Chapter Ten  
Cherem

Tim McGee drives to work alone today, his wife having said she would leave later in her green Fiesta, intending to arrive at about 9:00. It's normally only on Tuesdays that they work together at NCIS and yesterday, their first day back together from their honeymoon, could've gone infinitely better. Rather than resuming her duties at Saint Mary the Virgin, Siobhan's returning to the Navy Yard today, her assistance in high demand among her NCIS sisters.

The elevator doors open on three and McGee's about to get out when Leroy Jethro Gibbs puts a hand to his chest and walks him backward into the car. The doors close and Gibbs throws the Emergency switch to halt the car. The lights dim to blue, the lights under the handrail come on to supplement them. "Morning, boss."

"Morning, McGee." Neither man considers adding 'good'. They've had precious little yesterday and expect none today.

"Can I…" he glances around the empty car, "help you, boss?" Shifts are changing, there are going to be a lot of aggravated agents who'll find the main elevator out of service. He also considers it a very ominous sign that Gibbs had so obviously been waiting for him.

"McGee, I don't know a lot about computers," that fact is almost legendary, "but you do. What'll it take to get those pictures of our people off the Internet?"

"Well, er, it'd take a ... I suppose a Court Order, if we could find the Internet Service Provider and if there were only one or even a few–"

"McGee, do you see a pentagram hanging from my neck?"

"Er, no, boss."

"I'm not asking about courts. I'm asking can you get those pictures ... of our people ... _off _the Internet?"

"You mean delete them?"

"Yeah."

"Like a virus? Attack the web?"

"Yeah, like that."

"Well, er, boss... isn't that illegal?"

"If it were legal I'd be asking you about it out there."

x

"Uh..." Yes, he did wake up this morning. He did drive in. He really is standing here and Leroy Jethro Gibbs just asked him to do something so illegal that he's not sure there's a word for it. "Well, I could, uh, I could design a ... a bot." Thinking on his feet isn't so easy in the Bizzaro world. "It could seek out, detect and destroy certain files, then self-delete before an anti-virus program can identify it, but first copy itself with a few changes in parameters, spread through the Internet, self-propagating and self-deleting." 'I'm not really saying this, am I? We uphold the law, and Gibbs makes sure we do it.'

"I can, er, program it to last a set number of generations, then go extinct. It could obliterate a great percentage of the files; the few I miss would be lost among the crowd of Internet porn."

"That's good, McGee. Get started on that." Satisfied, he turns, reaches for the switch.

"Boss," Gibbs halts, "er, attacking the Internet, sabotaging it… it's a Federal Offense."

Gibbs turns back, nearly none-to-nose with him and his eyes say quite eloquently how much he cares. A few seconds later he moves again to give the elevator back to their arriving and departing colleagues. He flips the Emergency switch, the lights change to normal but, unsummoned, the car doesn't go anywhere.

'Did I drug myself this morning and not realize it?' "Boss, what about ... what about evidence?"

"We'll have evidence. When we catch this bastard we'll have his computer," he turns back to McGee, and McGee doesn't want him to, "but how long do files last on the Internet?"

"If they're not deleted? Forever."

"I'm not going to leave those pictures on the Internet forever. When our friends are in their eighties and nineties, those things will be there. Take this," from his jacket pocket he pulls a paper, presses it into McGee's hand, "keep it, and if you need it, you _use _it. Understand?"

"Er, yes."

Gibbs pushes the open door button, the barrier parts and he leaves.

The lights are the only things that are normal.

x

When the doors close and the car starts to descend, called to the lobby, McGee can't believe it. Yes, it did happen. Gibbs just ordered him to... He looks at the paper in his hand and his blood freezes. The message isn't typed, it's handwritten in Gibbs' distinctive script.

'_April 3: I ordered Timothy McGee to attack the Internet to destroy picture files. SSA Leroy Jethro Gibbs_. _DSAIC_'

xxx

SSA Kevin Lamb and his partner Lisa DuBois get off the rear elevator, the main one apparently out of service, and walk down the long hall to their fourth floor bullpen. Unlike many other teams, mostly those on Beta and Gamma shifts, they don't use the cavernous Operations section downstairs. Their former team leader Bob DiMarco had believed in keeping the team focused by using an office, and when Lamb had been promoted from Senior Field, he'd seen no reason to change a policy he'd wholeheartedly supported.

As they approach their office, Lamb glances at DuBois beside him. "Still no answer from Jan?"

DuBois shakes her head. They'd breakfasted together in the café on 6 and confirmed that neither had heard from the woman all night. He'd called her cell when she didn't meet them as was her usual routine, but he got no answer.

Levy had run out of the office last evening after receiving a call from her mother and had been incommunicado ever since. They'd not blamed her for that, the entire day had been extraordinarily stressful, more this time on personal levels rather than professional, but there was obviously some family distress that'd sent Janet out of control. She'd been gone from the Navy Yard long before either Lisa or Kevin had left but what's unusual is that she hadn't returned any calls since.

Neither of them is particularly worried; there are protocols for emergencies and Levy has used none of them. They'd known - or rather expected - that they'd see her for breakfast, but when she hadn't shown by the end of the meal Lisa had called once again, once again only getting her voice mail.

When they enter the office one mystery is easily solved; Janet is already at her desk at the far left corner of the rectangular room. "Hey," Lisa calls, unbuttoning her jacket, "missed you for breakfast. How're your folks?"

Levy doesn't glance away from her screen as Kevin goes behind his desk beside the door and Lisa heads to the right corner for her own. The women's desks face one another from opposite corners.

"_Hey, girl_, you..." DuBois greets brightly and Levy looks up, "look like shit."

x

This is a different enough morning greeting to snare Lamb's attention. Levy, rather than replying, reaffixes her attention on the monitor screen before her.

"Jan?" Lisa tries again as Kevin approaches.

"What?" seems to come from a thousand miles away.

When Janet raises her head, Lisa sees the bolts of blood that sear both eyes and it's then that she realizes her friend is wearing yesterday's clothes. She's evidently showered, maybe downstairs but "Have you been here all night?"

"Yeah. Been trying to identify 'Faker Zero'. Got three probables and a possible."

"Good work," Kevin tells her, "but you didn't have to stay up all night doing it."

"Yes I did."

"We've been trying to reach you," Janet tells her.

"Phone's dead," she says as distantly, glancing at her open cell phone on the corner of the desk next to the charger. "So'm I."

Kevin and Janet exchange concerned looks over the woman's head. This lifelessness goes not only beyond fatigue, it goes beyond anything they'd ever known from her.

"How did things go with your mom?" Janet asks in an effort to draw her out.

"What mom?" Janet asks dismally. "I don't have a mom."

Kevin Lamb hasn't used his 'boss voice' since a week after being appointed Team Leader. He hadn't expected to have to. "All right, Levy, snap out of it _now_. What's bothering you?"

"Janet Levy's dead."

x

That's the second time she's said this and Lamb is done plucking answers out of the ether. "What do you mean you're 'dead'?"

For a moment it seems the woman is about to cry, but she forces it back. "I got to the Synagogue last evening late for my funeral, but I wasn't allowed past the entry. Rabbi Silverstein had someone put this on a table for me to pick up." She pulls from her pants pocket a crumpled ball of paper, smoothes it out on the desk and passes it up to him.

He tilts it to show Lisa the distinctive angular Hebrew writing before holding it up to her. "Mad dogs and Englishmen, remember, Jan?"

She shakes her head, won't touch the paper, dabs her eyes with a crumpled tissue. "It's a magillah of Cherem."

"_Levy_."

x

Janet is clearly trying to focus her thoughts, to fight back tears. They give her the half minute it takes for her to look up and speak to them. "My family is Hasidim - I'm Hasidim - and my parents never liked that I don't follow the traditional ways."

It's an unnecessary reminder of what they've known for years. She'd explained to them long ago that she could hardly follow the traditional customs of dress or appearance either as a Metro Police Officer or as an NCIS Agent: 'I can't be in a firefight as the sun's setting before the Sabbath,' she'd told them, 'and say to the perp I'll be back tomorrow evening, or work a Crime Scene and not touch a body or evidence - and Undercover Ops would always be out.'

The pair know it'd been a difficult decision for their friend, but it's clear now that it's a decision that's caught up with her.

x

"What happened last night?" Lisa DuBois asks, trying not to press, but her partner and friend had said - twice - that she's dead.

Janet fights to steady her voice, to keep from giving in to the humiliation of tears. "Mom called. She said Dad and the others were at the Synagogue declaring a Cherem. By the time I got there it was over. No one would speak to me. Rabbi Silverstein ... told someone to set the ... Proclamation on the table." She can't meet their eyes.

"Jan," Kevin says compellingly. She eventually looks up. "Roman Catholic and Lutheran here."

She fights to steady her voice. "It's an Excommunication. I'm Ostracized. Cast out. I'm not alive anymore, not even recognized as a Jew by some. No one may _talk _to me, come closer than six feet; I can't buy, I can't sell, I can't go to Temple or participate in–"

"_WHY_?" Lisa's outraged. She'd known Jan's family didn't like that she'd chosen to make concessions from strict observance of Jewish laws, but she can't imagine them taking this extreme step after so many years.

Tears trickling down her eyes, no longer regarded or wiped away, Janet confesses that "I've been dead to my family ever since someone showed them how I shamed them by posing for a bunch of nude pictures."

x

Lisa bites back a dozen outraged shouts ranging from 'but you didn't' through 'they can't do that when it's not your fault'. She turns to their Supervisor, seeking advice or inspiration.

"We can prove they weren't of you," Kevin says, but Levy shakes her head.

"No you can't. I tried. He won't listen."

"But we have plenty of proof–" Lisa tries.

"No you _can't_!"

"But–"

"Don't you _understand_?" she cries, leaping from her chair to confront her friends, the rolling chair toppling over with a crash. "You _can't_, because when I tried to make him see reason and he wouldn't answer or even look at me, I realized that this is the last _straw_! He doesn't care if I did or didn't pose for them. As far as he's concerned, I've embarrassed the family for years and I've turned my back on our faith and practice for the_ last time_! I'm dead, dead to all Jews, dead and unburied and finished."

x

When Kevin Lamb finally tries to answer this he still considers it too soon. "Jan, I have no idea what I can say. If time off were going to help I'd give it; if bringing your family all our evidence would make a difference I'd pack the car full this second. Tell me what we can do."

"Time off means nothing to a dead woman–"

"_You are not dead_!" Lisa explodes and ignores Lamb's signal. "This is unfair!"

"I told them that," Janet replies dismally.

"Lisa, would you excuse us a minute?" Kevin asks, cutting off Lisa's retort. "And ... We'll be back."

"I'm not going anywhere." She stares at the offending paper which makes as much sense to her friends as the situation does. She uprights her chair from the corner, sits down, shoves the paper off the desk and it flutters to the floor. "Got nowhere to go."

x

When Lisa closes the door she looks up at the tall man and moderates her shout to a whisper. "What're we gonna do?"

Lamb waves her to follow, walks away from the door. A moment later Lisa catches up. "I know what I'm going to do," he declares. "I understand Jews respect people who meddle." He stops, considering them far enough away. "I'm going to take the pictures we have of her from the web, shots with a dozen different body types, and I'm going down there and meddle that father until he does whatever it takes to reinstate Jan. Meantime..." he looks down at his friend speculatively, "we know next to nothing about this Cherem thing. Talk to people, find out where we stand."

"And if they decide _they _can't talk to or come within six feet of her?"

"Then I'm going to use Special Agent Gibbs' method to educate them."

xxx

"What've you got, DiNozzo?" Gibbs calls for the report before reaching his desk.

"Gamma shift identified fifteen probable suspects who might be 'Faker Zero'." This hard fought target is the one who'd originally received the image files from 'We' magazine's records and posted the first fake, the one who'd initiated the cascade.

"Any of those fifteen work for 'We'?"

"No. I'm checking likely connections of friends and acquaintances."

Fifteen is far too many. It narrowed the field somewhat but not enough. "You and McGee. Share the load with Kelman, Abby and Cyber Crime. I don't want 'probable', I want definite." He looks to the women on either side of him, they're attentive, anxious and as stressed as greyhounds waiting for the release of the electric rabbit.

"Palmer and David, let's not forget we have a wounded Marine." Both women look to him, surprised - then this gives way to stunned. He can almost hear their thoughts; 'what does Campbell have to do with this issue?' "Why'd he get shot?"

"The popular theory," Ziva reminds him of yesterday's conclusion, "is that he was walking beyond the target when _he _was shot."

"'The popular theory is bullshit'," Michelle says, sotto vocé.

"You got something, Palmer?"

"Err, no sir." She hadn't meant to be overheard. "That is, no, Special Agent Gi–" She nearly wilts under his glare. "Actually, that my Rule 6: 'The popular theory is bullshit'."

He's pleased she's begun the formation of her own Rules but: "Find me a theory that isn't."

"That rule," DiNozzo observes, "ranks up there with 'truth is stranger than fiction'."

"Actually it does. Number 5 is 'Truth is stranger than the best lie'. Once you've sorted through the alibis, sometimes the truth is weirder than the excuses."

"Like when?"

"The vampire John DeKalb."

He nods, giving her this round.

xxx

Gibbs, alerted by 'Pass and ID' about the arrival of his Army counterpart, elects to go down and wait the few minutes in the main lobby to meet Lt. Col. Hollis Mann near the Security Scanner rather than upstairs. When she'd last visited NCIS, the Army CID Investigator had worn her usual field attire, but today she's in dress blue, medals and insignia gleaming on her crisp uniform.

"What's with the brass?" he asks.

"I was on my way to a Retirement Ceremony when I got diverted," she says, her voice tight.

x

"Well, Jethro," she says when she retrieves her weapon from the x-ray machine's tray, "your Director gave mine some pretty shocking news."

"No one's happy about it. You didn't waste any time getting in."

"I saw some of the pictures before I came in, particularly the ones of myself. I'm looking forward to some target practice." She pushes her gun into its holster.

"I'll see if we can leave you something."

"How're your people holding up?"

"A lot of itchy trigger fingers." The elevator doors open and he leads her aboard.

x

The moment the doors close she reaches for the controls and throws the silver 'Emergency Stop' switch. The car jerks to a halt after rising only a foot, the main lights go out and are replaced by blue backup lights from above them and from under the hand rail.

"Holly?"

It's very rare for someone, particularly an 'outsider', to usurp his method of gaining privacy. She turns to him and he sees both a woman and an officer, both of them restraining much. It's quite some time before she says anything, and when she does her voice is ultra level, carefully controlled. In all the time they've spent together, in the various stages of their relationship, he's never known her to be this tightly constrained. There's violence just below the surface, caged like a tigress. "There are a lot of angry people, Jethro."

"I know," he assures her, able to imagine from how his own crew is taking this situation, how those members of NCIS' sister agencies are coping. Normally he wouldn't care, openly; now he's crossed his own line and he has to.

"We have the four photographers, two in Holding being kept quiet by Jefferson, the others in Interrogation 1 & 2 waiting for us to break them."

Mann knows the familiar softening-up process so very well, she uses it regularly. Keep the subject isolated, let him or her stew, to wonder when the Interrogators are going to come in, let their fear argue with them for a few hours. This time she doesn't have the patience for a few hours. "I've seen some of the pictures,' she reminds him. "Pictures of me."

"And?" He'd much rather be taking action, but at the moment action must wait.

"Well, they're not as good as the real thing." She tries for a smile; it doesn't reach her eyes and it's as false as her tone.

"You gonna be able to do this?"

"Oh, don't doubt me," she warns; her hand, perhaps subconsciously, kept close to her weapon. "I'm doing this." But she deliberately moves her hand away.

He reaches for the switch. "Then let's get it done."

xx

Greetings in the bullpen are cordial but perfunctory; there's little inclination to socialize and even the normal casual banter is silenced by tension.

"I'm waiting on Campbell's shooting," Gibbs 'reminds' David and Palmer, his tone warning them of the consequence of his having to ask again. While they wait on their simmering photographers, there's still that outstanding case to occupy time.

With his team assigned, he has some minutes to work with Mann upon the testimonies of the four Paradise Publishing photographers. If there's only one bright aspect of this case for Gibbs, it's the opportunity to share some daylight hours with this intriguing woman. Though the circumstances are far from pleasant, and he can't say to her any of what he would if they were alone, he'll make the best of these hours for the company.

Mann begins evaluating Suzanne Blake and Harry Shaster while Gibbs focuses on breaking, if he can, Aaron Comer's and Deborah Norwich's alibis.

Aaron Comer had photographed NCIS agents while and his associate Suzanne Blake had taken pictures of Army operatives, while Harry Shaster had covered the Air Force and Deborah Norwich had photographed the women of the Coast Guard.

At a silent exchange with Gibbs, he uses his color printer to produce three papers and Mann sticks them into a blue NCIS folder and they depart for Interrogation Two. Gibbs will observe this particular exchange; it'll be disconcerting for the female photographer to be interrogated by an Army Colonel on a Navy base and Mann's looking forward to confronting Suzanne Blake.


	11. I Have To

Chapter Eleven  
I Have To

Reverend Siobhan McGee stands on the grassy edge of the paved path outside the main entrance to NCIS, needing these minutes to prepare - mentally and spiritually - for the ordeal to come. Once she enters this huge and occasionally forbidding building her time will not be her own. She needs fresh air, can't enter yet, but pulls her blue jacket tighter about herself. Though today is considerably less windy than yesterday, she's not sure if the morning chill comes from the crisp April air or from within her.

She'd come in after Timmy, driving here rather than proceeding to Saint Mary's because she's needed here; but there's such a thing as being too needed. She'd driven into the rear parking lot rather than using her assigned space in the garage because she wanted to have the time the walk around the building would give. But now that she's reached the front door she can't go in, and stands aside off the path to the entrance.

She prays, focusing her mind upon her prayers, needing to call for help before she can be of help. It's Wednesday, she should be at Saint Mary the Virgin, hasn't even 'reported in' since flying in from Ireland on Monday but her mind is neither focused on one set of duties nor the other, nor even on her personal hopes, disappointments or maelstrom. She's so fractured that, when she closes her eyes, she's not sure what she wants to see when she opens them; Saint Mary's, NCIS or home. Her vote would be that last Bed and Breakfast in Ireland.

She doesn't want to keep her schedule, literally doesn't want to open her eyes but she knows there are people here who need her as much - or even more - than her parishioners do.

'But how can I give aid and comfort when I'm angry, when I'm _scared_, when I'm as much a victim as any of them?'

x

Sunday was Ireland. Monday Washington, arrival from Reagan Airport, blissful return 'home'; old for Timmy, new for her. Tuesday drive in together, ecstatic reunions with friends, the senses-battering kaleidoscope welcome from Abby - and then the obliteration of bliss.

She didn't want to come back today, not even to fulfill her stated intent of boxing the mélange of decorations that stuff her office. She wouldn't if yesterday hadn't become such a...

She shoves it out of her mind. Eyes closed, she can sense, can hear that agents are coming and going as she stands off to the side of the path, not caring how she appears, confident that no one will intrude upon her privacy.

She locks her attention more firmly upon her prayers and gradually the tightness in her chest eases, her spirit relaxes with her body and she slowly but steadily feels that renewal of spirit and of peace. She can face the day. She can do this. God is with her; she feels His presence, His comfort and knows that she can do this.

x

She opens her eyes and jumps in her skin. Ducky Mallard is standing a step before her, also off the path. "Oh! Ducky, you scared me."

"I _am _sorry," he tells her in that sincere manner that so typifies him. "I didn't mean to."

"It's not your fault. I was praying."

"For help to come inside?"

She tries for a smile; it's not easy. "Was I that obvious?"

"Not at all, Mother."

She considers this. It's her title, and she rather enjoys the new lyrical 'Mother McGee', but: "Ducky, I think I should like it if you'd call me Siobhan."

He sketches a small bow. "I would be honored."

"No honor, believe me."

"Oh, but it is, that you would give up the honor of being called 'Mother McGee', after such a long period of anticipation."

She smiles ruefully. "Am I _that _transparent?"

"Not at all, Siobhan, but I have been a keen observer of persons for a very long time."

x

She doesn't know anyone else who can 'boast' in so self-depreciating a manner. "Really? What insights would you have of me?"

"As a woman who's been quite unfairly cheated out of a new wife's due; that of being honored, lionized in fact, by her friends and family." She's not quite startled, she's long known he hits close to home, but she hadn't thought he would hit _so_ close. Yes, the loss stings, this hadn't been at all what she'd expected her return to Washington to be like, but she'd thought she'd covered her feelings, her disappointment, better. She senses, however, that he's far from finished.

"As someone whose sense of duty exceeds even her sense of obligation, for today is Wednesday and yet you are here. That though your schedule is at your discretion, you _could _escape the weight, if not the reality, if you resumed your normal life and trusted in your husband and his partners to resolve the problem, for such will be resolved one way or another."

'Yes', she thinks, 'Timmy and the others will solve the legal aspect'. But that means little to the brutalized spirits of her sisters, and she feels a stab of shame that she'd actually been tempted to withdraw, to escape, to go back to the safety of St. Mary's. But she's asked for this man's insights and steels herself, because he's not finished with her autopsy.

"As a woman who has been brutalized physically in the past and must now endure it emotionally and psychologically, yet one who knows that once you step through these doors you take on the burdens of helping those who have been abused while at the same time putting aside your own emotional needs and leaving no outlet for yourself, hence your most flattering offer to me. You know I will be a willing resource yet will not unshoulder my burdens onto you."

x

She forces as much of a smile as she can manage. "Guilty on all counts." It'd been painful, but not quite as painful as she'd anticipated.

"Guilty on none, madam. I salute you for your dedication and must wonder if, in your position, I would do the same. But consider this: storm tossed as you are, do not let your anchors, of which I am proud to now consider myself to be one, as your husband is one and your friends are others, do not let them slip along the sea bed, but hold them tightly."

"Ducky, may I confess something to you?"

"No, madam, you may not."

x

She imagines her surprise must shine so brightly on her face; she never imagined he would say 'no'.

"Unlike you I cannot grant absolution, but like you I can keep confidences."

It's still hard to say it, and she has to fight her shame to be able admit that "I nearly didn't come this morning. I'm hurt, and I didn't _want_ to face the hurt again, but I can't step away. Yes, it's duty, but it's more. Yet though I pray for the strength - and I _will _do it, will listen and pray and keep my own feelings tightly inside - I don't _want _to. I don't want to 'shoulder these burdens'." She can't meet his eyes, feeling only new shame.

"No one should do this alone," he tells her, and the quality of his tone allows her to look again. "I hope that when you feel you can endure no longer, and your husband is not available, you will seek me out. I will not be hard to find," he promises.

She remembers that summer afternoon on the garden bench when she'd asked Timmy to be her secular lifeline. Now Ducky has become another. "Ducky, thank you. I've come to know I can depend upon you when I feel lost."

His smile is as gentle as his nature. "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

"'Who watches the watchers'?"

"Yes."

She reaches out to embrace him, and kisses his cheek. "You do."

xxx

Suzanne Blake looks up from the long table in Interrogation Two when the door opens and a US Army Lieutenant Colonel carrying a blue file folder with the NCIS sigil upon it steps in. Then she sees past the blue uniform to a familiar face. "Colonel Mann? I don't understand, the Navy, they've..."

Always keep a subject off balance, Mann thinks. If I were using Jethro's rules, this would be number one. "This is a big investigation. Army, Air Force, Coast Guard, Navy, Marines, we'll all in it." She steps close enough, her uniform nearly brushing Blake's clothes as she looks down upon her from a half inch away. "How deep are you in it?"

"I don't understand."

Hollis can virtually taste her fear. "Yes you do."

All four photographers had been informed why NCIS was initially interested in them. She'd chosen Blake to interview because she'd met her in the photo sessions some months ago. Then she hadn't thought not to trust the woman. Now she intends to correct that oversight.

"Someone with access to the unpublished pictures of us that you took leaked them to fakers. Tell me, did you have access?"

"_No_!" she exclaims, leaping right away from her seat and getting out from under Mann's vulture gaze, backing away from the table.

"Be a simple matter for you and your colleagues–"

"I don't know what you're talking about! I didn't do anything."

"Sit down, Miss Blake."

"No. Do I need a lawyer?"

"Have you done anything to make it necessary for you to see a lawyer?" If she'd asked _for _one, they'd be done, but she hadn't actually _asked_, so Hollis decides to claim some flexibility.

"No, that's not what I said."

"Then you don't want a lawyer?"

"You're confusing me."

"Do you confuse easily, Miss Blake? Like in knowing who has access to the pictures you took? Pictures like this?" From the file folder in her hand Hollis pulls a color photograph of herself standing partially immersed in a pool, the water just high enough up her thighs to moisten her...

"I had nothing to do with that!"

"Really, how about this?" In this next picture Hollis lies upon a kitchen table, legs spread high in the air in a wide V, her fingers spreading her labia in deep, open invitation.

"NO! I didn't do any of that! I _wouldn't_!"

x

Hollis pulls out a picture taken in her own office. It's not one of the published ones, it's one McGee obtained from Paradise Publishing's computer. The face, the angle, the expression is identical to that in the two obscenities.

In many years conducting these interviews, Hollis Mann has learned many things. Suspects, even under pressure, can lie most sincerely; but no one has ever been able to flush completely white-faced at will.

"Who has access to your pictures?"

"I - I - I don't know! Art Department, Publicity, Layout - could be any of a dozen departments. I can't say how many people. Before the issue is published anyone could copy the files."

"How did you know?"

"Know what?" she asks, her fear spiking.

"That the pictures were last accessed, collectively, before your issue went to press, not after?"

"I - I - I meant anyone could! They're not secure. An - and after an iss - issue is published, no one pays attention to them. They're not secure. I su - suppose they're deleted afterward, I n - never bothered to care."

"No, they're not deleted, they're still out there."

"I'm trying to say I never cared a - about unused pictures. M - my job is to create new work, not old!"

"It's a convenient system you people have, resources just sitting around to be picked up by anyone." She knows Paradise Publishing is going to change this and other policies; too little, too late. "When you turn in pictures for an assignment, who do they go to?"

Suzanne takes a deep breath, holds it, fights to get her fearful stammering under control. "Patrick DeMarle, he's our manager. But he wouldn't do anything like this any more than anyone else would!"

Mann doesn't waste her breath reminding the woman that someone did, and if the individual photographers aren't trafficking in high quality head shots, an unlikely conspiracy to say the least, then it has always been more likely that the one with access to material from all the photographers would be the first link in the ascending chain.

xxx

"I'll be damned," Michelle Palmer announces to the bullpen.

"Maybe so, if you don't give up that witchcraft," DiNozzo 'advises'. She turns to him, stricken silent rather than having a sharp retort and he's left to wonder why she's suddenly gone white.

"What've you got, Palmer?"

Gibbs' voice from outside the area breaks Michelle out of the recollection of last evening's near-disaster, the secret she's sure Jimmy will keep and which she intends to carry to her grave. She doesn't ever want to slip like this again, and for the first time in recent memory she's relieved to look to the bullpen entrance to see her boss, together with Hollis Mann, arrive.

"I was backgrounding Corporal Harold Campbell and I think I might have found something."

Gibbs gives Hollis Mann a brief 'I'll explain later' glance, knowing she knows the kind of idiosyncrasies that make up the dynamics of his team - more the pity. He focuses instead on Palmer: "Do you intend to _share _it?"

"No, sir, I mean yes sir. I–" she bites the words back, starts over. "Corporal Campbell had an Order of Protection against him two years ago, taken out by his ex-wife."

"Why didn't this show up on his Record?"

"It's an expired Order, nearly two years stale. It went sour while he was with the 17th Regiment in Kuwait. He's only back in the States for the past two months."

"Why was it issued?"

"Domestic abuse. His wife - ex-wife - Margaret Campbell alleged he would get drunk and hit her. NCIS investigated and designated the case as 'Undetermined' when she chose to withdraw prosecution. She didn't file with the Corps, this was a Civil Order so the issue was investigated when word reached us but as a formality, no complainant, and when the Order expired she never renewed it. I can't find any reference that they've had any contact since his return."

"Who investigated the case?"

"Supervisory Special Agent Martine Joswig - I mean the _late_ Martine Joswig and her team." It's Melanie Kelman's team now; she had been Senior Field to Patrick Larsen and Kenneth Templeton.

"Where does the wife live?"

"Atlantic City, New Jersey."

He withholds comment. Just because she's hundreds of miles away doesn't mean she didn't do it or doesn't have a confederate. Is she even still in Atlantic City?

"DiNozzo, check out the wife."

"On her, boss."

Gibbs says nothing on that; and with the glint in Mann's eyes he decides there's no point. Today it'll only make things worse. "David, what about the head shot?"

x

"Nothing."

"Nothing?" That's unlike her.

"Metro PD has released nothing on the shooting."

"Get it now. I want everything there is on the head shot victim so we can close Campbell and move on." He picks up his phone's receiver, Ducky has an 'in' with the Metro ME, a rather significant one, but before he can push the intercom button a phrase reaches him, couched in a very unpleasant tone. "What's that, Palmer?"

"_Nothing_, sir."

That was very definitely something. He sets the receiver down. "You have a problem, Special Agent Palmer?"

"_No _... sir."

x

Michelle watches Gibbs stand up slowly, deliberately, walk around Mann who'd pulled up a chair before his desk and cross the bullpen at that same deliberate pace, seeming like a battleship crossing the cove. The other agents are dead silent, probably seeking secure defense from the salvo to come. Hollis Mann is especially quiet, but Michelle can see in her boss' eyes that it's the CID Officer's presence to witness this confrontation that aggravates him even more. At her desk he places his hand flat upon it, leans down slightly and his tone is equally flat. "You have something to say, let's hear it."

Trapped, she sighs explosively. "I said 'make work'. You're giving us this _obviously_ collateral damage investigation to take our minds off the real case."

Actually, he _had _given the women this follow-up to take their minds off the pictures, but he'd intended it as a break, and not something to be openly challenged on. Suddenly he's not feeling so generous. "I decide what case my agents pursue."

"Waste of time."

x

Gibbs doesn't know whether to be astonished, outraged or gratified. Is this the timid _girl _who, a few months ago, could barely put two phrases together in his presence? Whose most frequent expressions turned to him were apprehension, fear and terror? _She _is confronting him, openly defying him?

But is this a fluke, a one-time thing, or is she becoming a true Agent?

"Focus on your job, and if I decide to give you two jobs you focus on both of them." There'll be times when two disparate jobs will seem like a vacation.

"I _can't_!"

He straightens up, towering over her. "Go home."

"_What_?"

"You're useless here if you can't focus on your job, so go home." He can read her eyes like a billboard. Being sent home isn't a disgrace as much as it is the loss of the chance to find and confront the Faker.

She stands up, still a fraction of his height but her eyes blaze with the fire he wanted. "I'll _focus_."

x

Gibbs turns, mainly so she can't see his incipient smile, and halts, annoyed more than surprised to find a woman bent over the front of Ziva's desk, conversing in whispers with the Mossad officer. Unable to see her face but seeing the attention DiNozzo is giving to the bending woman's tightened skirt, he gives his words the bite Palmer had sharpened. "No secrets here!"

She straightens - fortunately - and turns; it's Lisa DuBois from Lamb's team on four. "Sorry, sir, I was just - you were busy and I really need to consult with Officer David."

"About?"

"A collateral aspect of the Internet case, sir."

"Yes," Ziva interjects, "an unexpected aspect of the case has developed and I am asked to accompany Special Agent DuBois to her office for consultation."

He can read that every word they've said is literally true and equally mendacious, but he's had enough bullpen confrontations for one morning. "Go."

He checks his watch, seeing he's late for an appointment, which is problematic because the person he's meeting doesn't know about it.

xx

As the women push through the door to the stairs and a more private conversation, DuBois says "Thank you. I'm a bit out of my depth but I'm glad you're willing to talk to Jan."

"I too have had to decide which traditions I shall observe and how deeply. It is a difficult matter which to choose, and there are often consequences."

"I've never heard of a Cherem."

"They are exceedingly rare; I have never encountered anyone involved in such a thing, had never thought I would hear of one being invoked. Certainly I would think it would be particularly rare in America. It is something of an act of last resort. But to a devout Jew it is a very severe thing."

"On top of everything else that's happening to us, this must be tearing her apart."

xx

Janet Levy sits alone at her desk in the empty office, solitude her life sentence. She's alone. Abandoned by family. Abandoned by friends. Abandoned by country. Abandoned by culture. Abandoned by Religion. Abandoned by _God_.

Solitude is her sentence, innocence her crime.

Maybe, for having turned away from some of her culture, this is her destined punishment. She'd tried to find balance between her life and herself - and she'd failed. A partial, modified Hasidim; who had she been fooling?

Herself, obviously, until today when, with blinders removed, she sees her fate. Solitude - to be cast out from everything – and for posing nude. What does it matter that she didn't do it?

'I'm not a Jew, not _anymore_. No religion, no identity, no people, no family, no _God_. Nothing.'

The torment of this Internet violation was just a tease. The very people she'd've turned to last evening for help, for comfort, are the ones who'd already decided to cast her out, to punish - to _execute _her - before she could arrive to defend herself. Yesterday was the tease. Now, today, not yesterday, is the torment.

x

Jan stares at the Sig in her hands. She's held it for so long, this last piece of her life, that the handle and barrel have warmed through. It's warm. Her gun is warm, almost alive. This is the last thing in her life that's alive since she died last evening.

'Died. I've been dying for years. Every time I gave a piece of myself to Metro, to NCIS, I died." She raises the gun. 'Dad was right. I'm dead. Finished forever. Not even _God _will look at me.'

She stares at the gun, feeling its weight, its warmth, its reality in a world suddenly gone unreal. It's the last thing in her life that has any meaning, any depth.

And now, cast out forever from everything that's given her life meaning, cast out from family, from self, from God, there's only one thing left for her to do.

She opens her mouth, puts the end of the barrel between her lips, closes them about the warm metal. Her thumbs together over the trigger, she aligns the barrel.

'Sever the medulla. According to Ducky I'll be dead before the bullet comes out of my skull. I won't feel a thing.'

She carefully the barrel, gradually presses the trigger harder. 'You were right, dad, I'm dead. Mom, I wish you'd've seen me, just to say _goodbye_.'

She presses the trigger harder.

Presses it harder.

The noise is so loud.


	12. Devastation

Chapter Twelve  
Devastation

The office door slams into the wall hard enough to shake the room. "JANET _NO_!" Lisa DuBois' shriek is so startling Janet Levy jumps in her chair, her hands jerk hard and the Sig flies out of her mouth to clatter across the desktop.

Furious, Lisa stalks across the office to her friend, screaming "What the FUCK are you _doing_?" She grabs the gun from the desk, whirls and hurtles it at the far wall beside the door.

"NO!" Ziva cries as she ducks, but the gun only dents the wall before it ricochets loudly against the filing cabinet and bangs down to the carpet. She straightens when she's sure the gun won't fire and confronts the furious agent with equal outrage. "Are you _crazy_? You know better than to throw a loaded gun!"

DuBois ignores the shout, confronting Levy with her own lung-bursting yell. "What the Hell are you doing?"

"What are _you _doing!" Levy screams back. "You almost made me shoot myself!"

"You _were _going to shoot yourself!" Lisa shrieks at her partner, her voice certainly audible through much of the division but Janet tries for greater volume.

"You don't _scream _at a woman with a gun in her mouth!"

"_SHUT UP_!" Fists clenched at her sides, Ziva's long screech blasts the shrieking women.

x

Lisa and Janet turn stunned expressions to Ziva but the momentary silence allows Lisa to turn back to her partner and say without ripping vocal chords: "I can't believe you're in here trying to blow your head off!" Janet doesn't answer. "Didn't you trust us to help you? Did you think we'd abandon you?"

But Janet, driven beyond endurance, shatters, falling sobbing into her friend's embrace. It takes a long time, the two women hugging desperately, for Janet to say something unintelligible.

"What?"

Janet struggles back to her reason, her voice trembling. "I said 'No, and yes'."

Lisa feels the brutal stab to her soul while Ziva, in an effort to salvage the situation, asks: "Do you not mean 'yes and no'?"

"No."

Tears, long withheld, burst from Lisa. "My God. My _God_. What's happened to us?" The women embrace more tightly; cling to each other, both broken as they long to relieve the agony while Ziva searches heaven for the answer.

xxx

Lieutenant Jeffery Carpenter nods and waves to the waitress behind the long counter of his favorite restaurant across the street from the Station House, not slowing down as he heads toward his favorite booth in the rear. "The usual, please, Terry."

"What else?" He's been coming here for three years, his weekly near-noon breakfast menu rotates through the calendar even if his schedule doesn't change with the clock; Wednesday late-morning is two scrambled with sausage and browns and black coffee, the last already prepared. She reaches for the pot.

Carpenter comes to a sharp halt; his booth isn't empty. He always sits facing the crowd, but someone else is in that seat.

"How's the investigation going?" Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs asks.

x

"Don't you ever go home?" Carpenter asks, slipping into his least-favorite seat, hating the feeling of his naked back.

"Thought I'd grab some fresh air."

"You look like you need it, but why way out here? Doesn't the Navy Yard have its own air?" Carpenter doesn't think LeeJay would rise to the joke, so he's not disappointed. "Get any sleep last night?"

"A little."

Carpenter isn't surprised he has to be content with this. "Well, if hearing about a double shooting is your idea of fresh air," he says, sliding the sugar dispenser closer, "you must've had a hell of a day."

"This'll need a lot of improvement to be a day in Hell."

"That bad?" The look he receives is eloquent enough. "Okay, how's your Corporal?"

"Gonna live. I'm more interested in your hit."

Carpenter squints suspiciously. "Why?"

"Paperwork."

"Bullshit." Gibbs only shrugs. "Okay, be that way."

x

"Harold Campbell's record isn't squeaky," Gibbs tells him, "at least before the Corps, but it's a lot more likely he got hit from your head shot than that your guy got it from a leg shot."

"Always thought so. As you said yesterday, it's more likely someone's gonna target a head than a leg." He's unfazed by Gibbs' hard glare; it may work on Agents, not him. The coffee arrives; he waits until Terry is gone. "What do you need to know?"

"Enough to close a collateral damage hit - if that's what it is - and untie resources for a real problem."

"Okay. If this helps, I don't know how squeaky clean your Corporal was, but Kensington was filthy. I didn't know him, I rarely get to chat with my vics, not like Ducky Mallard, and I never came across him as a suspect or 'person-of-interest', but I was surprised by how long his sheet is. Paul Kensington is - was - into drugs, bookmaking, sharking and money laundering, busted six times but never did more than the minimum each time. Then he got away on a technicality in a shooting; ironically a head shot but this one at close range."

"What happened?"

"Store robbery went sour, owner didn't have enough in the safe and paid the balance with his life. More like an execution than a robbery but the case got tossed when the evidence got tossed on chain-of-custody and his lawyer got it ruled out."

"How?"

Carpenter's allows his face to show his thoughts. He won't do that with many, he will with his old friend, for he respects him as an Investigator first. "Unit transporting the evidence got behind a three car pile-up, multiple injuries. They rendered aid, capped a bleeder before EMTs got to the scene but the evidence was in the back seat of their closed Unit. Lawyer said they weren't attentive to the boxes in the back seat, got all the evidence tossed."

"Don't get me started on lawyers," Gibbs commiserates. Terry returns and puts a plate in front of Carpenter that could only have been started before he arrived.

"Parker and DiNatilie are two good officers, and they almost certainly saved a life. They swear no one approached their Unit and I believe them. But Kensington's lawyer got on a 'can't prove a negative' horse and got the case tossed. That was a week ago."

"Now he's dead."

"Not too many people are crying over it, but before anyone asks, Parker and DiNatilie were at a Crime Scene in Georgetown when this went down."

"Never thought otherwise," Gibbs says blandly as Carpenter reaches for the salt.

x

"Yes, well, I'm in no mood to listen to theories, they'll be too many of them, as many as there are armpits. Anyway, you'll like this part: we found a door pried open to a vacant apartment on the fifth floor of the building across the street, and a window'd been opened and closed but it's the only one left unlocked, perfect angle for the shooter. Tool marks suggest a screwdriver for the window, maybe a bar for the door."

"Same route every morning." Gibbs doesn't bother to make it a question. The assassin needed only wait.

"Creature of habit."

"Sniper amateur." It was a good shot, the morning had been windy, gusts of up to 35, but a professional planning a hit would also have better access to the vantage point. "What kind of round?"

".44, but he policed the brass."

"Didn't wait for your men to do it."

"Ho ho."

"Who are you leading with?"

"Too soon to tell." Carpenter attacks the browns. "Kensington was alone, did the shooting alone. Even if the case hadn't been tossed we'd lost too much, couldn't even introduce the weapon, so unless he confessed that was out. But he's not big enough for anyone to put out a contract to shut him up."

"Family? Cartel?"

"Wannabe at best, he's not even a blip on their radar; too small, too sloppy. If not for a car accident he'd be looking at 25 to life for Murder One, maybe plea it down to 10 to 15."

"Good sniper costs money," Gibbs points out unnecessarily, raising the question of why the hit on a nobody-wannabe.

"Speaking of which," Carpenter says with a leading smile, elaborately drawing his pad from his jacket pocket, ready to record an alibi, "where were _you _when this was going down?"

"Looking at nude porno pictures of my team."

x

It feels good to wipe the smirk from Carpenter's lips, but it doesn't make the story any easier for Gibbs to tell.

The two Investigators will keep their ears open on each other's cases, redirect news as it surfaces, but this conversation relieves neither of them.

xxx

DiNozzo and McGee are deep in research at their respective computers, so the crash of two fists onto the desktop to their right, the hollow metal ring accompanied by a strangled scream launches them both to their feet. Michelle's fists are on the possibly dented desktop, her body shaking so violently they fear an epileptic seizure. An instant later she's up and around her desk and headed out the rear of the bullpen.

Hollis Mann watches from Gibbs' desk, but says nothing.

"Probette?"

DiNozzo instantly regrets the moniker when Michelle whirls on him, murder in her eyes. "I'LL _KILL_ HIM!"

Both men come out from behind their desks and approach her carefully, not really needing to ask what the problem is and each grateful that Gibbs is out of the room. Tony reaches her first; McGee hangs back near her desk where it's safe.

"Michelle?" Tony's not going to call her by any more nicknames today.

She's still shaking, trembling violently in stiff muscled fury. DiNozzo stands before her, but McGee moves in behind her vacated desk and sees the image upon the monitor. He's immediately sorry.

x

It's an e-mail, sent to apparently dozens of recipients, so many that the list was truncated but under the large bold heading is printed 'More here.' The link is a website and the image….

In full, deplorable color, Michelle hangs by clamped wrists from chains spread widely apart from the ceiling, other chains secured to the floor clamp about her ankles, spreading her legs as widely but she's smiling because she had in all the shots 'We Magazine' had taken. Her faux body is crisscrossed with bloody welts from the whip that now slices into her left breast. Blood trails down her body all the way down her legs from each of many vicious cuts. A rope from the ceiling wraps about her waist and feeds down between her spread legs, evidently pulled hard from behind up to the ceiling, her weight borne upon her crotch by the torturous rope.

Her smile implies how much she enjoys the bloody, intimate torture.

x

"Who's Bob Maxwell?" Tim asks, reading the sender's name.

"We used to date – _five years ago_," she snaps furiously, looking past DiNozzo. "I broke it off because he wanted to do things I _didn't_." She waves her hand sharply at the monitor. "_Guess what_!"

She stalks past DiNozzo and he's afraid of what her fury will drive her to. He moves quickly to block her from reaching her desk.

Michelle looks like she'd wanted to smash the monitor - DiNozzo doesn't want to know Gibbs' reaction when he returns and sees the destruction - but she manages to get her fury out in words. "I haven't spoken to him in five years but this is _obviously_ his way of twisting the knife, sending this out to dozens of his perverted friends and letting me know he's doing it!"

"Take a break," Tony directs, making her look up at him in sharper outrage.

"I'm going to break–" she grates.

"Take a break," he repeats in his 'Order' voice. She glares up at him for a long moment and he wonders if she'll defy him - she'd defied _Gibbs_ - but she turns sharply and storms toward the rear stairwell door. If high heeled slippers could stomp, the men suspect she would. She shoves the door out of her way and only the pneumatic hinge prevents an explosive crash.

When she's gone, Tony turns to Tim. "Probie?"

"No need to say it, just watch and learn." But then he remembers their CID liaison, looks to her where she'd been watching from Gibbs desk.

x

"I'm going to grab a coffee," Hollis announces, leaving the desk. "Want anything?"

"Two blacks," Tony says.

"Coming right up. I should be fifteen minutes." Receiving McGee's nod, she heads for the elevator.

"Like I said, watch and learn." McGee slips into the vacated seat, minimizes the image to the window tray and opens a file, typing furiously. DiNozzo, leaning across the desk, is unable to interpret a fraction of the code he sees so he settles for keeping watch on the elevator, doors and MTAC stairwell, the platform of which also accesses the Director's office.

It takes about seven minutes to copy the image, do something Tony doesn't bother to watch to the copy, maximize the e-mail, delete the image and attach his sabotaged image, hit 'Reply All' and 'Send'.

"I was going to feel guilty," he says, deleting Michelle's copy of the offending email, "but I won't. When his friends get this email, purportedly a follow-up from 'Bob Maxwell', it'll erase the other email if it's been opened; it's more recent, but I also included a 'Jack-in-the-Box' that they're not going to like him for."

"I have no idea what you just said."

"Good," Tim replies with a smirk. "Then just like Colonel Mann, you won't have anything to deny."


	13. Greater Love Hath No Man

Chapter Thirteen  
Greater Love Hath No Man

Supervisory Special Agent Kevin Lamb enters his fourth floor office in a black mood which grows darker still when he sees the three distressed women within, and his blood pressure peaks when he hears the reason for that distress. "I went to see your folks, to get this straightened out," he tells Janet Levy, adding his bad news to theirs. "They wouldn't open the door."

"They won't," Janet confirms dismally.

Lisa DuBois keeps her silence, knowing that if Lamb had known what Jan was doing in his absence, he'd've gotten through that door. It was only because it'd taken so much time to resolve things here that she hadn't called him before he'd returned.

The thoughts only play up the madness of this situation.

"Perhaps," Ziva says, holding out the printed result of Janet's night-long research, "I should bring this back to Gibbs."

"Yes, thank you," Lamb says, having neither idea of nor interest in what's on the paper. He wants Ziva gone so he can deal with the madness his team is embroiled in. As the woman departs, he turns to DuBois. "Lisa, the face 'We' magazine used for Jan, pull and print out every image using that shot." Seeing the blood drain from Janet's face, he pulls his cell phone off his belt and presses a code. He has only a few seconds to wait.

/Shepherd,/ the speaker says in a passable rendition of the Director's voice.

"Lamb here. I'm pulling my team out of the porn loop to deal with related fallout."

/No you are _not_! I'm assigning your team a liaison from CGIS, Special Agent Abigail Bourne. The other Agencies are hit as we are, each is sending an agent to coordinate the search under NCIS' lead./

"_Negative_, director," Lamb says tightly, able to imagine Shepherd's expression as she hears this seeming insubordination. "I'm pulling my team out of the loop to deal with related fallout."

/_Why_?/

Janet's face is a mask of her distress but he isn't going to pull punches. "Special Agent Levy just tried to kill herself."

xx

The elevator doors open to the basement, then the glass and metal doors to Autopsy part and Ducky looks back, expecting to see Fred Higgins or one of his team enter for an update on the corpse of the Asian man laying between himself and his Deputy. "Ah, Agent Palmer," he greets Michelle broadly, then looks to the surprised man on the opposite side of the table. "You have a visitor, Mr. Palmer."

Anyone else would take the words and tone at face value, but Jimmy has assisted the venerable man long enough to be able to hear the hidden undertone: 'Your wife is not unwelcome, my boy, but this is not the best time. Kindly make this brief.'

"'Chelle?"

"Ducky?" Both men are surprised by her tone. Did she just openly ignore Jimmy? "Could I ask a favor?"

"A favor?" This is growing suitably mysterious.

"There really isn't anyplace in this building where someone won't think I'm a complete maniac and fit me for a straight jacket or sedate me."

Ducky glances at the taller man opposite the table from him, but his Deputy has no better insight into this. He looks back. "A maniac?"

He had never thought of the woman in that manner. He'd known her in the past, before she'd gotten some experience in the field, to be nervous, apprehensive, occasionally fearful but she's usually seemed quite stable.

Michelle evidently tries for a smile but walks past them, heads for the silver door at the far left corner of the suite, pushes it open and lets it close behind her. A second later a piercing shriek, barely muffled by the door, fills the suite.

Each man turns from the silver door to look wonderingly at the other as the scream goes on and on.

x

"Excellent lung capacity," Ducky finally says as the shrill scream reaches a most impressive duration with undiminished volume. It takes another eight seconds for the shriek to finally ease down the scale to eventual silence and the men wonder if it's going to be repeated. However, the door opens and she steps out, heads toward the door.

"'Chelle," Jimmy calls as his wife crosses the room past them, heading directly to the doors, not glancing at either of them, "would you _expla_–?"

"No."

She leaves through the sliding door. The elevator hadn't been called to another floor so its doors open and close and she's gone.

The bemused men turn to one another over the corpse, and Ducky's the one who finally breaks the silence.

"I do hope this is not going to become a habit."

xx

Tim McGee has kept his silence for as long as he can stand. Slapping Michelle's old 'friend' Bob Maxwell was satisfying but bush league, causing no permanent harm to the dozens of people who'll be distinctly inconvenienced by the one they think is Maxwell, but this plan Gibbs has is of an entirely different order. What he'd done was a smack; to head, face or ass it doesn't really matter, but what Gibbs wants is no smack, it's a sledgehammer, or worse, a nuclear blast. What he'd done for his innocent, abused partner had been illegal – if it could be traced – but a misdemeanor. His boss' plan is a Felony of the Highest Order.

Launching himself from his chair, ignoring DiNozzo's look and that of the returning Ziva, he stalks down the hall, takes the elevator to the top floor, down another hall to the Emergency stairs, takes them two at a time and bursts through the metal door onto the roof.

Up here, his only company is the wind that ruffles his hair. No one comes up here; the last time he did was in January, now it's a warmer day in April but not much better for his spirit. Before him stretches the Anacostia river, behind him ranges the vast Navy Yard, but in his soul is still damnation.

He yanks his cell phone out, not even having to look at the screen as he activates his most frequent speed dial. He'd come here for privacy, but privacy isn't what he needs. Six rings, seven, /Hoigh, honey,/ his lovely wife's voice comes to his ear like a caress.

"Hi, Shav. Are you alone?" Yesterday she was counseling Agents two or more at a time in order to not fall too far behind.

/For the moment,/ but her tone warns him that this probably won't last very long. He wonders how many people she's seen today. Yesterday there'd been no time for the usual 1400 Tuesday Liturgy celebrated in the employee lounge and he doubts she'd even tried to reschedule for today.

She's right downstairs, he could... But at the moment face-to-face isn't best. "Shav, I'm sorry."

/No. Don't you dare! You've nothing to be sorry for./

If she only knew. He isn't calling her to commiserate, but... "I really need your advice."

A tiny pause. /Of course, a chuisle./

"I have a friend..." He shakes his head sharply. 'This is stupid, I'm _not _going to pull the 'friend' routine with _her_.' He tells her the whole story as briefly as possible, concluding with: "Gibbs is going to sacrifice his career, possibly go to prison, certainly be fired from NCIS, to get those pictures off the web."

x

There's a long silence. Heartbreakingly long. "Shav?"

/I'm here, hon./

'She sounds as shaken as I feel.' "What do I do?"

/What are the chances he'll be caught?/

He sighs, shrugs, realizes she can't perceive either of these. "I don't know. Seventy-thirty? Maybe worse."

Again that long, considered pause. /I'm not sure I can help, a chuisle. John tells us 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.'/

"But do I have to _cast _his life down?"

/No./ That's the first thing she can be definite about. /You don't _have _to do anything - except follow orders./ There's a long, long silence. /Timmy, creating this virus is like his ordering you to load your gun. You can follow orders and load it, but he's the one who'll have to pull the trigger./

"I don't _want _to load this gun."

Again a long time to consider. /Timmy, I'm your wife, I'll support whatever decision you feel you have to make, but would you give this message to Jethro?/

"What?"

/I'm not the best one to advise, because his plan will help _me _as much as your agents, your friends. But if my benefit comes at the cost of ... of whatever it'll cost him, then I _don't _want it. And I don't think I'm alone./

"I'll tell him."

/Call me back when you know./

"I will, hon."

/Slanté, a chuisle./

He kisses the phone, hears her answering parting and closes the phone.

xxx

"Nice of you to show up, David," Gibbs tells her when she enters the bullpen a few seconds after McGee. She'd left on her 'consultation' with Agent DuBois before he'd left the base to confer with Carpenter. Hollis Mann, evidently hoping for some significant progress since she'd checked with the other agents, turns off a computer in the adjacent bullpen and comes around the partition to Gibbs' desk.

"I have a list," Ziva hands him a sheet of white paper, "compiled overnight by Special Agent Levy, that corresponds to but narrows Cyber Crime's. There are three probables and a possible for Faker Zero. They are the first posters identified on day one, the 'possible' had several originals but also some 'reposts'."

The news galvanizes the agents; they now have potential targets and are more than ready to hit them.

"McGee," Gibbs crosses the bullpen and tosses the sheet onto the computer guru's desk. "Find these people, where they are right this minute. When you've got them targeted we'll take the top one, give the others to Kelman, Higgins and Lamb. And don't forget your other assignment."

McGee freezes, forces himself to move again. "No, boss. It'll be ready." But his words are cut by those of the woman across the bullpen.

"I do not believe Special Agent Lamb's team will participate in this round up."

Ziva's announcement brings everyone to a halt.

x

This is incredible. Not only did one of their own uncover the most likely suspects but Lamb's is the only other team to have more than one woman on it. "Why?" Gibbs demands.

Ziva considers, for an instant, being discreet but changes her mind. The story will get out, it'll reach the Deputy Special Agent-in-Charge through other channels very soon - and the news will certainly help to motivate _this _team. "When Janet Levy's family found out she shamed them by posing for nude Internet pictures, they cast her out, shunned her. She is isolated from the _entire_ Jewish community and, as a result of this Internet humiliation and the shunning, she just tried to commit _suicide_. We reached her with half a second to spare or she would now be dead."

The stunned silence is everything Ziva had hoped for.

Gibbs shatters it. "McGee, DiNozzo, Palmer, David, those four locations. _Now_!"


	14. No One Got Hurt

Chapter Fourteen  
No one got hurt

After Tim McGee located of the first computer whose IP address was traced by Janet Levy, the information about the other two most likely identities of 'Faker One' was disseminated to Supervisory Special Agents Melanie Kelman and Fred Higgins and their teams. The fourth name, the 'possible' suspect, will be held for Kevin Lamb's team when they return from 'detached service' back to the main task force. Gibbs hopes that's soon enough for them to have the satisfaction of closing the trap on a potential target.

Before departing to their quarry's lair, accompanied by Lt. Col. Hollis Mann, their liaison with Army CID, Gibbs had directed Ziva and Michelle to each select and print an image of themselves posted by their quarry that was not created from a head shot published by 'We' magazine. Mann had done the same thing. None of the men had any desire to look at the images produced and hoped they wouldn't have to see them.

Now Gibbs and his extended team surround the anachronistic quasi-suburban home of Thomas Trovillot in Terra Cotta in the District's northeast edge, the lair of the first name on Janet Levy's list. McGee and Palmer guard each side of the one story green and yellow house, DiNozzo and David cover the rear door while Gibbs and Mann make ready to assault the front door.

x

Awaiting the signal to either burst in or enter in a more sedate fashion, Tony and Ziva approach the rear door from the white fenced yard, having left McGee behind in the thin passage. Sigs held at ready, they hope Trovillot will be stupid enough to run.

"Tony, you have surprised me," Ziva admits.

"What?" He hadn't expected her tone or her compliment.

"I would not be surprised to find every faux picture on fifty flash drives at NCIS, and we would be tracking these images on our own people's computers for months to come, but I fully expected you to be leading the pack."

He meets her eyes. "I'm never gonna stop looking," his gaze drops briefly to her chest, then up again, "and hoping," his leer is vintage DiNozzo, but then his voice grows hard, "but this bastard crossed the line. Someday you might find a surveillance camera in your shower, and it'll be mine, because I only like the genuine article. But this hurt you, and a lot of my friends, and _that's_ a line I don't cross."

"Well," she smiles, genuinely impressed, "Tony DiNozzo the gentleman. I would never have imagined it."

"If you tell anyone, I'll have to kill you."

"Do not worry; your virtuous secret is safe with me."

A loud crash of splintering wood erupts from the front of the house and Tony uses a hard kick to answer it.

They're in a kitchen as Gibbs' authoritative shout fills the house. "_NCIS, get down on the floor, legs spread, hands behind your back_!"

Certain now they face no opposition in the small kitchen, Tony favors Ziva with a leer. "My favorite position." He glances suggestively at the linoleum and she punches his arm.

x

On their way to the living room in the front of the house they pass the bedroom and halt, half amazed because the collection of computers, video monitors, plasma screens and cameras almost leaves no room for a bed. "The Probie's fantasy land," Tony exults.

"I have my own fantasies, Tony," Tim says as he walks past them, having followed through the shattered back door.

When Tony and Ziva reach the living room Gibbs and Mann hold to the floor with their guns a young man, yet all they can see are washed-out jeans, a holed tee shirt and a clump of longish, dirty blond hair. Michelle is straightening from having secured the prisoner in silver handcuffs. The gleaming cuffs seem to be the only clean thing on Trovillot.

"I din't do anythin, man," his voice is muffled by the carpet.

x

McGee turns back to enter the bedroom as Thomas Trovillot is shoved by DiNozzo into a seat which creaks ominously with the impact. McGee doesn't care what his partners are doing, his expertise is best directed to the vast electronic collection that surrounds him. There are three desktop computers, two laptops, two plasma screens, a wireless router, three color printers, two high-capacity digital cameras and a myriad of other, more specialized tools, almost all of them linked together in a complex network more intricate than any he's seen in months. "All this stuff," he muses, "and you couldn't spring for a security system?"

'It's just as well he was frugal on safety,' Tim decides. 'Press a hot key and probably wipe every hard drive, make my job tougher.'

A horrifying thought hits him. How many Gigs of disk space on these things is dedicated to porn?

One monitor displays a satisfactorily incriminating slide show screen saver, he starts his search there. The image that appears when the screen clears is both startling and sufficiently damning.

xx

"You have no right to come in here without a warrant," Trovillot declares, trying to rise from the chair. Gibbs stands close enough that he can't gain his balance and falls back into the seat, all without Gibbs having to touch him.

He doesn't bother answering, simply unfolds and holds before the man's face the warrant that authorizes him to 'come in' and far more.

"What do you want? I told you I didn't do anything."

"_McGee_?"

In answer to his boss' call, Tim steps into the hallway. "There's 'Photoshop' and several other programs on these computers, and I found an incomplete picture of Director Shepherd on one monitor that'd timed out."

"So?" Trovillot asks, trying to bluster through.

"You make these things?"

Trovillot shrugs. "So? It's just a hobby, man. No one got hurt."

Ziva unfolds the paper she's pulled from her pocket at the mention of this 'hobby', displays the image of herself laying on a couch, legs lewdly parted, the face is one of the many not published in 'We' magazine's feature. Michelle displays an image of herself apparently partying in a bar, open clothes displaying all her charms. The breasts on this woman are considerably larger than Michelle's, so much so that she'd probably risk daily backaches.

Hollis' image is the most shocking, she's kneeling and resting on her heels while surrounded by four equally naked men, her legs spread wide to display her vulva glistening with moisture. She's smiling not for a magazine photo but in anticipation at the erect male member a half inch from her lips.

"So? It's just fantasy," Trovillot insists. "No one ever gets hurt."

xxx

Kevin Lamb, Lisa DuBois and an uncharacteristically quiet Janet Levy assemble before the closed apartment door. When Lamb had been here last, hoping a reasoned appeal would resolve the problem these people have with his agent, he hadn't gotten past the closed door, but it had been clear that the minds of the people within were equally closed.

This time he intends to get past more than a door. Making certain all their shields are visible on belts under their black field jackets - he doesn't intend for there to be any misunderstanding of their intention - he knocks on the door.

It talks a second set of raps for a man's voice to call from within "Who's there?"

"Special Agents Kevin Lamb, Lisa DuBois and _Janet Levy_, NCIS. May we come in?" He'll start out civil, until they make him drop it.

"You may not."

This was the extent of his progress earlier. Without a warrant, without even indication of a crime other than against reason and fairness, he can't compel them to admit him but, seeing the pain in Janet's eyes, he's not about to go away either.

"You have a key?" he asks the daughter quietly, his voice not carrying. With her key they may enter at her invitation.

Janet looks at the cylinder. "They changed the lock," she says, pain turning to outrage.

"DuBois." He cocks his thumb at the shiny lock, not bothering to say the words. Over the crouching woman he asks his partner: "Do you want to take it?"

"Yes, but they won't hear a dead woman."

The lock clicks open and he reaches for the knob. "They'll hear a live, _pissed off_ Fed." He leads them into the apartment.

x

Ira and Sarah Levy, stopped dead in their living room, are surprised, then outraged as the three black jacketed agents walk in.

"How dare you break into our home?" Ira Levy demands, his graying black beard and the white fringes of his tallis trembling in his outrage. His gray curled hair before each ear swings beside his black framed glasses.

"I'd considered kicking down your door but that would've been provocative," Lamb grants.

"Get out!"

"Gladly, but first you'll listen to your daughter."

"I _have _no daughter!"

A half-dozen retorts snap to mind, he says none of them. In breaking and entering he's given enough offence; it's time for diplomacy.

"When you've heard what we have to say you'll have a daughter again." He doesn't glance at Sarah Levy, who stands silently beside her husband, the family dynamics quite clear. Sarah's emotions and hopes are easily read on her face, but she'll say nothing to try to sway her husband.

"I will not," Ira Levy declares.

"Papa–"

"_Silence_!"

x

Kevin is outraged and appalled that this man can have such sway over a strong, confident Federal Agent, but they're here to resolve problems and if a little subservience will smooth things, well, she knows them better than he does.

He pulls a folded magazine from his jacket's inner pocket, makes sure they recognize the cover before opening it to a previously folded page. Janet Levy's face is a color insert beside a column article about her. "You recognize this?"

"Of _course_."

"Janet told us you were both proud of her when this came out."

"We _were _proud of her," Ira grants, "and if she'd confined herself to that we would still have been."

Lamb pulls a folded stack of papers from the opposite inner pocket and bends them backward to straighten them. "NCIS as a whole is under attack, many of our agents are suffering this same assault." There's a large table to his left, he starts laying out the pages in a grid upon it, all the pictures different, all similar.

"Take that filth off our table!" Ira roars. Lamb ignores him, continuing until the tabletop is covered. "Take that _filth _and get out!"

"_Look _at that filth."

"How dare you?"

"_Look _at it! Is that your daughter?"

x

Unable to help themselves against this outrageous demand, Ira and Sarah Levy approach the table. The pictures are outrageous, their very explicitness go far beyond erotic to depths for which there are few words. "This is our daughter..." Ira says mournfully, barely able to breathe the words. Sarah is appalled, shaken, near tears.

"_Is _it? I told you all of NCIS is under siege. Look _past _the pictures." He points to the fulsome breasts of one image. "Is _this _your daughter?" He points to the wide hips of another woman. "Or is _this _your daughter?" He points to the long, lanky frame of another woman. "Or is _this _your daughter?" He stabs the image of another whose body probably has more tattoos than Abby Sciuto's does. "Or is _this_?" This woman's breasts must be double-D at least.

"I ... do not understand."

"_None _of them are your daughter, only this." He puts the magazine down upon the expanse and then touches in turn every face, row by row, rank by rank, every expression identical.

Ira is stunned, Sarah sobs quietly. "I do not _understand_."

"It's called photo manipulation, a face attached to another body."

Lisa DuBois pulls a stack of papers from her own pocket. "It's happening to _all _of us, abusing all of us," she deals her stack across the table, each body vastly different, then touches her own face on the magazine page, "and we can't stop it."

Ira steps closer, examines the appalling collection, the identical faces on different bodies, and turns his ashen face to Janet. "Metuka sheli."

Kevin and Lisa gather the papers from the table, not getting in the way of the hugging and tears.

x

"I've been so blind."

"_We've _been so blind," Sarah corrects when tears have passed, restored daughter between restored parents.

"I am so sorry, Janaleh."

"I'm sorry too," Janet says, unable to let her parents go. "I've tried so hard to make a life that I've forgotten how much hurt I can leave behind."

"We were proud of you," Sarah insists.

"We _are_ proud of you," Ira corrects, and turns to Kevin and Lisa. "Thank you. Thank you for bringing our daughter back."

"You're very welcome," Kevin says.

"But you never really lost her," Lisa insists.

"No," Janet agrees, "but it was _too close_." She sighs, deep regret drowning her voice as she steps from the embrace of her parents to face her partners. "I tried to make a difference in the world, and I almost lost my family. I'm sorry."

"Sorry for what?" Lisa asks, confused. Apologies go to the parents, not to them.

"I _tried_ to make a difference, to do good in the world," she tells them with surprising regret, "to save lives, keep the peace, protect the innocent …." Janet looks back briefly to her parents, then to her partners before her. "But I've learned I can have only the world _or_ my family, so I'm sorry." She removes the gold shield from her belt, holds it for a moment in her hand, reluctant to finish, then she holds it out to Kevin.

"I quit."

xxx

"Who sold you the pictures?" Hollis Mann demands.

"Who says anyone sold them to me, pussycat?"

Mann, dressed in her Blues with medal bars and Oak leaves, can hardly credit this man's foolhardiness. He won't make her mad, but she need not accede to Gibbs' lead. On her own authority she can bring this fool down, but she's far more interested in why he's playing this game of 'bait the cops'. The best way to play this game is to show his words and manners - or lack of them - have no effect at all.

"Who sold you the pictures?"

"Why do you even _care_? None of you lose anything by a few harmless fantasies."

xxx

"Janet..." Lisa takes a step to her partner, her friend of so many years, stops, too stunned, too appalled to say it.

"Please, Lisa," Janet nearly begs, her voice quivering in barely repressed emotion, "don't make it harder than it has to be. I've made up my mind."

Kevin takes hold of the shield; for a moment their hands share the gold emblem. "You're sure."

She takes a deep breath, steadies herself. "Protecting the Marines and the Navy, protecting dependants, fighting crime, stopping terrorism - it cost me my family, my whole identity as a Jew." She releases the shield, draws her hand back. "I'm sure."

"Janet ... _Special Agent_ Janet ... Think. Once done, it's done."

She tries to swallow back the regret that robs her voice, hushes it to a whisper. "Let it be done."

With heavy heart Kevin puts the shield in his pocket. "Goodbye." He turns, takes a step to the door, but Lisa can't leave yet.

"Jan... You're sure? _Think_. There are a lot of people in NCIS who depend on you, who love you."

"Say goodbye for me?"

Lisa nods, reaches out and pulls Janet into a tight hug and her own voice is choked to a whisper. "Take care of yourself, hon."

"You too." They reluctantly part, the agents walk to the door.

"Wait," Ira calls. Everyone does stop as he addresses Janet. "The day may one day come when you will be the dutiful daughter you're supposed to be," he looks to take in the departing pair, "but _none _of you will _ever _win an Emmy."

x

The tension gone, Janet shrugs, "Well, it was Improv, no rehearsal time."

"We could tell," Sarah says.

"Blame me."

"Oh, we do," Lisa assures her.

"Well then," Ira says, "your poor father doesn't need to have things sledge hammered into his head; so if you are determined to be the dutiful daughter, then take that blasted thing back, get out to the kitchen with your mother and help serve our guests."

xxx

"David, Palmer," Gibbs glances to the uniformed Army Colonel beside him, "why don't you and Colonel Mann get some fresh air and look for witnesses, give us a chance to chat?"

As the women depart, Trovillot looks up at Gibbs, his manner too confident. "You can't do anything to me, man. I know my rights, I've broken no laws."

"Invading privacy," DiNozzo says, growing more aggravated at this display by the moment, "internet porn, misrepresentation, harassment, and those are just the gross ones. We can find another half dozen more charges, no sweat."

"Artistic license. Every one of my works is fiction, so noted by a legal disclaimer, examples of free artistic creation all protected by the Constitution of the good ol' U S of A."

"Your 'artistic representations'," DiNozzo grates, "caused a woman to try to shoot herself in the head."

He grins more widely. "So? I didn't hold the gun. Fact is, you've got nothing on me and the law says you can't touch me."

David is back. Gibbs turns to her, annoyed. "I sent you out–"

"To look for witnesses. We have found nineteen, who were undoubtedly attracted by our surrounding the house, or at least by you kicking the front door in."

Trovillot's smirk reaches epic proportions. "Now you really can't touch me."


	15. Inquisition

Chapter Fifteen  
Inquisition

The agents, together with Lt. Col. Hollis Mann of Army CID, have removed Thomas Trovillot from his Terra Cotta home, the smirking man turning the 'perp walk' from door to waiting Criminal Investigation Division vehicle into a victory march. McGee, David and Palmer remain behind to disassemble and package a formidable volume of computers and related electronics. Gibbs has left his car behind when he and DiNozzo left with Mann but it'll take the already dispatched MCR truck to transport the vast collection of evidence.

Within the hour Gibbs and Colonel Hollis Mann confront their prisoner in Interrogation Two while DiNozzo watches from Observation.

Interrogation One is already being used by SSA Fred Higgins and SA Abigail Bourne of CGIS, who interview suspect two Sam Waters from Janet Levy's list while Higgins' team observes from the adjacent room. Melanie Kelman's team, together with SA Paul Bjorklund of Air Force OSI, will conduct their interrogation in Holding, though Kelman favors using Autopsy for the convenience of distance when she and her team finish with Henry Carter. She asked Ducky and Jimmy not to clean the table too thoroughly after storing away their latest subject.

x

"I'm telling you," Thomas Trovillot tells Gibbs and Mann with his ever-present smirk, "you might as well let me go. You can't hold me."

"Trafficking in Internet Porn," Gibbs assures him, hiding his aggravation when Trovillot's smirk widens.

"Nope, that one's out too. You gotta prove I uploaded it and I use the best security system."

Gibbs isn't going to reveal that McGee has already laughed in amazement at the flaws in that system. He expects the computer guru to have those machines singing arias.

"You also can't prove I sold or bought anything, no money changed hands. Believe me, I know the law. I researched it thoroughly before ever getting into this."

"Porn's a lucrative business." Gibbs remembers how much money Jamie Carr and Leanne Roberts had made on their 'Naughty Naughty Neighbors' Internet website before greed led from friendship to murder. He'd actually been amazed when he'd learned the extent of the 'take'.

"Not for me. I post only to free Adult websites. They're non-pay; you don't even register a credit card number to access them. And they're all marked strictly for 'Adult entertainment'."

Gibbs looks hard for a lie, but can't find one – yet. "No money?"

"Nope. This is strictly a hobby. For fun."

"Fun?" Mann demands. She's seen enough examples of this sick bastard's idea of fun.

"Yep. No one ever gets hurt, and I don't profit from any of it."

"You put in a couple hundred hours work into this 'hobby' of yours."

Trovillot shrugs. "Something to do - that doesn't hurt anyone," he appends quickly. "Don't need a job."

"No?"

"Nope. Hit Lotto two years back, 3.7 _million_. Bought my place free and clear - though I _am _suing NCIS for the damage to my front door and any loss if you guys leave the place open when you go. You also gotta return all my stuff."

x

Hollis walks slowly around Trovillot, stops above his left shoulder, "Karen Trump is an Intern," she says of her CID Legal trainee. "She's 17."

Trovillot tilts his head back to look up at her, his smirk back. "I know. Lovely redhead, I hated to lose her. But 'We' mentioned her age, goes to GW I think. That's the only reason I left her out. You won't even find the original images on my system."

x

Gibbs and Mann both know Trovillot, with his smug and superior attitude, is trying to anger them, to frustrate them into making a mistake. It's the oldest method after 'I didn't do anything' and far less likely to work.

"Why 'We'?" Gibbs asks.

"Why not? Lots of lovely, lovely women."

"A lot of them are looking forward to meeting you."

"Trot 'em in. Maybe I can line up a few hot dates while I'm here."

"Why that issue? 'Women Crime Fighters in the Military'; you were asking to get busted." Gibbs wants to punch the smirk that answers him.

"Did add a touch of excitement to the deal."

"Why not actresses?"

"You look at the web lately, grandpa? There's a _billion _out there; everybody's doing it, it's boring. How many Jennifer Anistons, Sarah Michelle Gellars and Angelina Jolies can the web handle? Artists are reposting _other _people's work - with credit disclaimers - simply because the market's totally flooded. In the past year you see more fakes of Koreans, Japanese, Swedes and Germans no one's ever heard of here because Jessica Alba, Dolly Parton, Princess Di and the others have been done to death. People are even doing Sophia Loren, Lucille Ball, Raquel Welsh; hell, yesterday someone posted a load of Barbara Hales from Perry Mason and Noel Neills from Superman just to have someone new to do."

"So you're doing the dead now?"

"Nice try, grandpa, but at least the dead don't bitch. And as long as I keep putting on my artistic disclaimer, the one that denies I'm using a real person, nothing can touch me."

x

"What about the others?"

"What others?"

"Sam Waters and Harry Carter."

Smirk. "Never heard of them."

"So it's a coincidence they started posting completed 'original' work on the web within an hour of you."

"Like I said, never heard of them," he assures them with a wider smirk. "If they've been bad, it's their bad, not mine." He leans back, getting comfortable. "Like I said, I don't hurt anyone. This is just fantasy."

"Where did you get your fantasies?"

"Why, running short?"

If Gibbs lost his temper with every smart ass punk, he'd be back in Mexico. Of course, it also helps his patience to be the one with the punk's jail cell key. "The head shots: who sold them to you?"

"Why you want to know? Are we talking deal?"

Interesting. He hadn't thought they'd be bargaining quite so soon. "What deal?"

"I give you the names, you show me the door."

Gibbs takes a long moment to consider it, glances up to Mann as though seeking her opinion, then back to Trovillot. "All right."

x

In Ob 2, Tony is stunned. "Did he just say that?"

To him Hollis Mann, standing behind Trovillot, looks like she's been punched.

x

"Tell us."

"Patrick DeMarle. But he doesn't sell to me because I don't buy. I get the stuff second hand from others."

"Out of the goodness of their hearts."

"Yeah."

"Now why don't I believe you, Tommy boy?"

"Believe it or not, no skin off my ass."

Gibbs determines he'll find the terms behind that deal. He knows the name. Ken Parcell's team had interviewed him along with so many others at Paradise, and he's been a center of attention since all four photographers reported they gave their work in to him upon completion of their assignments. "He's a Manager and he risks his job to provide head shots? But you get them without paying for them. Come on, Tommy-boy, tell me a better one."

"Okay, I'm not his contact."

"Who is?"

"We still have a deal?"

"Oh, we have a deal, all right. I get the names, I show you the door."

"Sam Waters. He buys the pictures, distributes them. He posts to Pay sites, gets a percentage based on hits."

"But he buys them."

"Fifty dollars per woman; per face that is. Only high quality face shots will do, we can't do anything with less than 500K. We can shrink a face, but without good quality, when you try to blend flesh tones you get crap."

"Fifty dollars?" No matter how many distinct expressions, this is low – too low for the risk, it seems.

"Women are cheap," Trovillot says, tilting his head back and aiming his smirk up at Mann.

"How do you get them?"

"Once a Fakir - Fakeer, that's how we're known, not Faker; we're sort of like the Indian mystics," Trovillot says to Gibbs, dismissing the cheap woman in the Army costume, "is done and has sold his lot, they're public domain. Anyone can have the originals to download and play with."

"Then why are you the first of so many, when you don't get the pictures first?" He'll break this next.

"Because I'm the best. I can turn out good quality work in about an hour. That's why I'm getting famous on the web. I have my own following."

Gibbs already has his plans for what he'll do with this man's 'following'.

"Now remember," Trovillot says, "we have a deal."

"Oh, I won't forget."

xx

When Gibbs and Mann meet DiNozzo in Ob Two, Gibbs has only one order. "You, McGee and, hell, everyone, find anything this bastard sold for a penny, didn't put on a clearly marked Adult site or anything else you can prove. Meantime, we'll get on to Higgins, find out what he knows."

"Higgins is in One."

"Good. Get on Trovillot. I'll have Kelman and her team track DeMarle."

"On 'im, boss," DiNozzo promises, his tone murderous. But then he pauses. "But didn't you...?" Gibbs' glare silences the reminder. "Right, boss."

When he's gone, Hollis Mann whirls on Gibbs, glad to finally vent her outrage. After all their work, after all the humiliation their people suffered – _her_ people suffered…. "What the _hell_ did you do?"

"Donno. What did I do?"

"You promised to let him _go_! How could you do that?"

"I know what I promised," he says, stalking away.

Mann is hard pressed to hold her temper, channels the anger into keeping up with Gibbs as he heads for the elevator and the more populated areas of the building. She wants to have this out with him, but knows from that tone that he considers the matter closed and she has no desire to open it - or him with a rusty can opener - in public. "Then what now?"

"Now we tell the Director we might not have anything."

xxx

Two hours later the team, at their desks, searches the many mirrored hard drives that have been loaded into McGee's system. The bullpen, the entire Operations Division, is silent save for the soft clicks of keys. Hollis Mann, no longer fuming, has commandeered a station on the other side of Gibbs' partition, the one she used earlier, and is pouring over the sickening images, focusing on her own people and trying to contain her nausea. Throughout the building twelve MCR teams, together with Abby Sciuto in Forensics and Cyber Crime in the basement, silently and intently devote themselves to a single task, that of breaking one or all of their prisoners.

No one speaks; telephones are silenced, calls rerouted to back-up agents; nothing distracts anyone from–

"_YES_!" McGee cries, thrusting his clenched fists high and startling a dozen agents.

Gibbs' temper isn't improved by his sharp jump in his chair. He crosses the open space through the bullpen, aware that everyone in the Division is on his or her feet, watching intently. "_What_?"

McGee beckons him to lean over so he can see the image. A moment later every bit of available space about and even behind the partitioned cubicle is packed with agents. Gibbs straightens, his glare clearing a zone free of not only his own people but Mann and the agents from the adjacent bullpens.

Gibbs bends down again, his blood runs cold at the image displayed on the screen. It's a naked Jennifer Shepherd bound spread-eagle upon a bed, mouth open and gagged with a red ball gag – how do they _do_ that? – the camera drawing attention to the gleam of a particular moist point. All Gibbs cares about, however, is that "You're sure."

"Checked it three times. Direct upload from Trovillot's IP address to at 0319 on Thursday, March 19, six days into his postings."

"Well?"

"Well what, boss?"

"_Call _her." He turns and, with Mann, stalks away to the elevator.

x

The other agents, few of whom had been in position to view the damning image over the partition wall, nevertheless disperse to their own places, vastly satisfied. McGee reaches for his phone.

"Tim?" Michelle Palmer is the only one who hasn't left his right side. He blanks the image as she steps around his desk to his right.

"Yes?"

"Siobhan isn't going to like this, neither is Jimmy, but I don't _give_ a fuck." She bends quickly, her arms supporting his head and shoulders to keep him in his tilted back chair, her lips pressed to his as the Division goes utterly silent.

Thirty seconds, forty-five, a full minute and then she releases him and his chair clatters forward onto its wheels. He tries to focus his eyes as her blurred body steps away back to her desk.

"Way to go, _Probie_!" DiNozzo calls, too impressed by the outrageous scene to feel envious.

Tim, sagged halfway down, head on the back of his chair, is unable to force the smile off his lips. The skylight is still not quite sharp nor is his voice steady. "Thanks…."

xx

Director Jennifer Shepherd feels particularly gratified to lead Gibbs and Hollis Mann into Interrogation Two. When she'd determined in the meeting she'd had with her Team Leaders over two hours ago that the one whose evidence, rather whose image, broke the case would have the satisfaction of confronting their tormentor, she hadn't thought the pleasure would rebound onto herself. She has no intention of deferring it, however.

Trovillot looks up as she enters, perking up from his long, insolent slouch. "Hey, babe."

"Don't you 'hey, babe' me," Shepherd says, continuing past him to the plasma screen set on the wall.

"Okay, hon."

She'd heard of his style and is surprised he's still relying on it. Hasn't he worked out that 'piss off the cops' isn't working? She turns on the plasma screen and her own image, forwarded from McGee's computer, appears. She's gagged with a red ball gag, tied to the four corners of a queen size bed, the camera angle providing a lewd and overly generous view between her widely spread thighs to her shaved and glistening labia. She's actually impressed by the manipulation; she'd certainly not been photographed gagged.

"This is one of yours?"

Trovillot leans back. "You betcha, sweetie. If you're really into that, I can give you a good treat."

"Oh, you're going to give me a treat, all right. And I assure you, I'm going to _enjoy _it." She removes the remote control from the top of the screen and enlarges the image, does so again, focusing over and over on the lower right corner. With every enlargement, Trovillot's face loses more of its assurance; at the end he looks very distressed indeed.

His cherished miniature disclaimer isn't there.

x

"You're under arrest for creating and disseminating Internet pornography, and I'm sure our Legal department will find numerous other charges to tack onto that. Special Agents Gibbs and Mann."

"Ma'am."

"Take _this_... into custody and confine him."

But Trovillot's confident smirk is back, even if it is forced. "Can't do that, pussy ... cat. We have a deal. I gave you Waters and DeMarle, you let me go."

Gibbs' hand clamps on his shoulder, yanks him to his feet. Before he can struggle, he's bent over the table and handcuffs clamp tight about his wrists.

"_Wait_! We have a _deal_!"

"Yes, we do," Gibbs admits.

"_Well_?"

"You give us the names, I show you the door. Right?"

"Right!"

Gibbs hauls him upright, turns him left. "There it is."

He shoves him through it.


	16. Goodbye, Agent Gibbs

Chapter Sixteen  
Goodbye, Agent Gibbs

By the end of the day sufficient evidence of carelessness has also been uncovered against Sam Waters and Harry Carter; Waters for selling his work and thus trafficking for profit, Carter for also neglecting to disclaim some his creations as fabrications not intended to represent the women depicted. Trovillot's fall was caused by so enjoying his hobby that he created and carelessly posted a picture at 3:19 in the morning.

And while the most common victims of these assaults are celebrities, the majority of whom endure this treatment as more trouble to fight via the courts than they could ever make progress in combating; these images are of Federal Law Enforcement Officers who spend considerable periods of their lives in court.

The most prolific creators of these non-celebrity, therefore less popular and lesser known, images being removed from Internet access for the foreseeable future, the effect of other creators is vastly limited. It's decided, to no one's satisfaction or pleasure, that the Internet proponents will be 'informed' of what is happening to their counterparts, and they be given the chance to withdraw from the field.

But the first three, their works being widely circulated, cannot escape prosecution; and NCIS' Legal Department Agents, and those of their inter-agency counterparts, are now as hard at work as their Investigator colleagues had been.

But the future has no effect upon the hundreds of existing images and the thousands of their variants. They're still out there, and gradually spreading and being added to private collections. Legal may have a solution that might work in some far flung future, but Gibbs has a plan that will work today.

x

It's 1900, and DiNozzo, David and Palmer are wrapping up their day, anxious to be gone. Gibbs looks to McGee, also reaching for his jacket. "McGee, you ready with that project?"

McGee's sure his face isn't the kind an experienced agent strives for; he doesn't want to hide his ambivalence this time. He watches his partners depart, wondering if Gibbs would listen to DiNozzo - doubtful - or either woman - more doubtful - and even what signal he could give. Then they're gone, he and Gibbs are alone and he's never felt more alone. "Boss?"

Gibbs doesn't look up from his work. "Just want to know when, McGee."

Trapped, not knowing what he can say to avert his friend's doom, he has to admit "Another half hour to fine-tune and check it, then it'll be ready."

"Fine, McGee."

x

The words tear at his throat, burn his mouth, rip at his tongue and lips and he has to let them out. "No, boss, it's not fine." He finally has Gibbs' attention and leaves his desk, the better to push his point. "It's not fine. It's a Felony. Tampering with the Internet, attacking information storage systems, both in this country and possibly abroad; it's the kind of stuff NCIS is supposed to prevent. Boss... Boss, you could go to prison."

"They attacked our people, McGee. It was a devious, underhanded attack. You heard what it did to Levy; she'd be dead if DuBois and David had been one second slower getting into that room. They attacked your partners, your friends... McGee, they attacked your wife."

"I know they did, and we got them."

"And what about those pictures? Remember you told me that, unless deleted, those things last forever? Once downloaded, it's too late to stop them. When our friends are old and gray, people will still be jacking off over those things."

"You won't destroy evidence."

"What evidence? The evidence is on those computers, stages of changes. Once on the Internet where anyone can get hold of it, they're not evidence anymore. Chain's broken when one faker could change another's work."

"Boss–"

"McGee, can you stand the fact that your _wife _could be on somebody's computer, after everything you did to save her from Ed Samson? Can you go home and look her in the face and say you had a way to spare her and you didn't do it?"

Put like that, he can't lie. "No."

"You've got to look out for your wife, that's what a good husband does. I have to watch out for all our people."

"So do I, but–"

"I know you can't do it." He holds out his hand. "My hand, my choice. You tell me what buttons to push and I'll push them."

Defeated, McGee returns to his desk and work, his heart too heavy for his chest.

xx

Forty five minutes later the sun has set, the room lit only by desk lamps and McGee's back at Gibbs' desk, the darkness flooding his soul. "It's ready," he says regretfully. Gibbs looks up at him; they're visible to each other only by the lamplight. "But boss, it's illegal."

"I know." He also knows why the man's so mournful, but this time he doesn't have a choice. He has to look out for his people, that's what a leader does. He also has Holly to consider, as well as all her people - and so many others - CGIS, OSI... If he didn't, he couldn't look a single one of them in the eye ever again. "What are the chances I'll get away with this?"

"Undetected?" Maybe he'll finally listen. "Fifteen, twenty percent..."

Gibbs stands up. "I've faced worse." He starts toward McGee's desk, but McGee stops him.

"I'll need to use MTAC, I need resources my computer doesn't have." They head for the stairs in the darkened chamber. "The 'bot will replicate a thousand times, seek out all copies of the files using the file names we've found on the web and the computers from the three we've arrested, make a thousand copies of itself, a million altogether and self-delete. The next generation will delete all _image_ files relating to NCIS that bear a name of one of our agents or those of the other agencies and the agency name, filtering out official government documents, then they'll replicate and self-delete. The last generation, a billion of them, is the most dangerous, it'll remain on the web for 7 days to clean up any new files, then go extinct."

They cross the dark platform to MTAC. "By then new 'artists' will find their work vanishing almost as soon as they upload, hopefully get discouraged and quit. But that's also the point when safety protocols on the web will probably catch you."

"Understood."

McGee turns to block him from reaching the Iris scanner. "Boss, I'm _begging _you."

The back of Gibbs' hand to his chest is gentle but it does move McGee aside. The blue light scanning Gibbs' eye seems painfully bright to McGee.

The door clicks open and Gibbs leads the way in.

x

Every female agent in the Headquarters Division stands in the chamber, the densely packed crowd barely leaving enough space to come off the ramp. By the light of the huge screen, Gibbs sees Jennifer Shepherd front and center, Ziva, Michelle and Abby flanking her.

"McGee," he says without looking back, "you and I are going to talk about the word 'secret'." It's obvious now what the man had been doing during his 'final check'.

"I did a lot of soul searching."

Gibbs picks out the man's wife to the right of the screen, deep within the throng. "I should've known any man who'd marry a Priest can't be trusted."

"You're welcome." The door closes.

x

"Jethro?"

"Director."

"Gibbs," the dark woman beside her says.

"Ziva."

"We've taken a vote," Shepherd says. "It was unanimous."

"And?"

It's Ziva who takes a half step forward and delivers the verdict. "If you commit suicide, we shall kill you."

Against that interpretation there's little he can say, but he sees from the silent nods of affirmation that it's their collective will. "None of you should have to suffer from what those bastards did. They didn't even do it out of malice; it was fun to them, a _hobby_. They did that to you and they didn't even _care_."

"You care," Tina Larsen from Document Analysis says.

"Yes."

"And we care," Susan Blake from Polygraph affirms.

"But McGee is right," Shepherd says. "Without publicity no one will know about our pictures or even care. That's why everything was kept quiet. That's why we didn't try to force the webmasters to remove the images, though most of them are deciding it's better to lose a few images rather than suffer what we're going to do to Trovillot and the others."

"In time it'll all be over," Cassie Yates says.

"What're left will be outdated, replaced by others," Carol Jordan predicts, not thrilled with the prospect, but having little better to hope for.

"We'll endure. Humiliation is bad," Nikki Jardine declares, "but we'll _endure_."

"What we _won't _endure," Peggy Callender declares, "is knowing you threw away your career for us – lost your shield, went to prison, were _dishonored _for us!"

"_No_!" Abby Sciuto exclaims, a fervent testament taken up in broken chorus by all of them.

Next Episode: Retribution.  
More than forty witnesses agree Ensign Mark Cabrera murdered Carol Gerber right in front of them. So how can he claim he's innocent? And how can Gibbs and his team prove it?


End file.
